11 FEBRUARY 1888, Page 3

Sir William Harcourt made one of his most tremendous orations

at Derby on Tuesday. He boasted that Lord Salisbury was about to begin "tobogganing" down the Home-rule slide, but none the less he abused the Unionists, from the beginning to the end of his speech, for their obstinacy in refusing to slide. He advised the Liberals to kick a good deal under the policy of the Conservatives in Ireland, quoting Benjamin Franklin to the effect that kicking has a good influence when your antagonists oppress you. And he told the Government plainly that, if they did not give the most ample opportunities for discussing their " wicked " Irish policy in Parliament, the Liberals would denounce them to the constituencies in every part of the country, and make the country, in fact, too hot to hold them. That is very tall talk. But Sir William Harcourt has to con- sider not only what the country will think of the Government's Irish policy, but what the country will think about having all its own interests postponed to the discussion of Irish policy. And we are very much mistaken if the country will not be very much more angry with those who try to lodge it in the latter predicament, than it will with those who are responsible for shutting up Members of Parliament who incite the Irish people to break the law. Sir William Harcourt has done a good deal of braggadocio in his time, but he has hardly ever reached so high a summit of braggadocio as the braggadocio of his Derby speech. It was eminently, as Sir Henry James said, one of the most striking of the performances of the Radical "Samson with a wig on."