Mr. John Morley was entertained at the National Liberal Club
on Wednesday by twenty-five of the London Radical Members of Parliament, to whom he made an interesting -speech, remarkable, as his speeches generally are, for candour and manliness. He made no sort of difficulty about admitting that he was very much relieved by the withdrawal of Mr. Blanes motion, which is another way of saying, we suppose, that he does not want Mr. Gladstone to be forced either to disclose his next Home-rule scheme, if he has one, or to dis- close the fact that he has not got one, and is all at sea on the subject. Mr. Morley made some excellent remarks on Lord Randolph Churchill's recent letter to Mr. Arnold White, and denied very positively that the Tory Party, except during their Jacobite period, had ever been really a popular party; but he entirely ignored, as Radicals will ignore, the great change that has passed over it since 1885. Further, Mr. Morley commented very acutely on Lord Randolph Churchill's disposition to truckle to the Labour party by lending it Tory help in carrying its nostrums for the better treatment of Labour. He quoted Lord Randolph's comparison of Labour to a blind Samson feeling for the pillars by which he may be able to pall down the social structure, and asked rather pertinently if Samson did not also pat an end to his own life by that feat, and whether any true friend of Labour would wish to see it use its strength for such a suicide. In almost all this part of his speech, we follow him with sympathy and admiration.
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