Mr. Balfour was the principal speaker at the annual Primrose
League meeting at the Albert Hall on Wednes- day afternoon. The chief feature of the speech was a bitter and violent attack on the Colonial policy of the Government. They had threatened one of our greatest Colonies, and, Mr. Balfour went on, "they have dis- turbed the mind of every loyalist in South Africa. There is not a man who had sacrificed anything in that Colony in order to maintain British interests, there is not a man who had been ready to fight for the Imperial cause, who does not look upon this Government as his worst enemy, who does not feel forced to turn away from the Mother-country for which he was ready to devote life and property, to consider whether he might not be forced by the mere perversity of the Home Administration to protect him- self in other ways." Hardly less vehement was Mr. Balfour's denunciation of the Education Bill, which, he declared, had lit a flame of indignation from one end of England to the other. It would be, if it passed, a monument of intolerant folly, since it failed to provide unsectarian teaching, and involved the ruin of the great cause of religious teaching in our national schools. There was a time when Mr. Balfour was conspicuous for equanimity and fair-mindedness. Both qualities were conspicuously absent from the Albert Hall speech, which marks the lowest depths of partisanship to which he has ever descended.
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