The Elections are drawing near, and some of the Tory
leaders are still wasting strength. Sir M. Hicks-Beach, for example, spoke a long speech at Cheltenham on Monday. Half of the speech was, from his point of view, very good indeed, being a well-reasoned and well.expressed attack on Mr. Chamberlain's land policy. We do not agree with the point of view, as the Tory chief evidently dislikes Mr. Chamberlain's end, the diffusion of landed property, as much as his means, and puts forward the argument that the obstacle to free transfer is 'not the law, but the worthlessness of land. The -experi- ence of Colonel Lloyd Lindsay's Association, however, exactly contradicts that, the patches they have sold being eagerly and instantly purchased ; and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach should have known that. From his point of view, however, half his speech was interesting ; but the remainder, which filled m whole column of close' type in the Times, was a re-hash of the Khartoum affair, which, we venture to say, no human being will voluntarily read. And, after all, it only comes to this, that we ought to have crushed the Mahdi and rescued Gordon ; but that it was folly to crush Osman Digna, who had under his command the beat of the Mahsli's fighting men. If we had not crushed him, he would have been the Mahdi's successor as temporal chief ; and Sir M. Hicks-Beach would have said, reason- ably enough, that Egypt had been left open to an Arab invasion.
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