Sir William Harcourt cannot be very well. His speeches lack
their usual wit. In his address to the election agents on Tuesday there was no good joke, unless the comparison drawn between the Unionists and a spiteful lady who finds another lady preferred to herself by her intended husband, and pre- dicts a most unhappy marriage by way of revenge, can be called a good joke. The chief part of his address at the Hotel Metropole was composed rather of bluster than of wit. He compared Mr. Schnadhorst to Moltke and to Nelson, and the Liberal Federation agents to Nelson's "bulldogs." He spoke of the Liberals who kept their old principles in 1886 as "deserters," and those who, like himself, surrendered them at once, as the faithful. He said that if the Gladstonians had been the deserters, and we the faithful, the country would have stuck to us, and would have fallen more and more away from them, which is a rather awkward way of saying that the multitude is so good a judge of principles that there is no appeal from its judgment. He denied that Colonel Sannderson is at all the man to achieve passive resistance of the true Quaker type ; and he spoke of the Unidirists as going to the country on "a rebellion in Ulster ;" but he carefully concealed how, if Mr. Gladstone comes in, he would deal with Ulster, or what it is now proposed to substitute for the cancelled Bill of 1886. The only policy of the Unionists, he says, is negative. He might as justly call it a purely negative policy which scattered the Armada.
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