. The Attorney-General, in his speech at Torquay on Thurs-
day, made a serious mistake in speaking of Mr. Gladstone's unfortunate reserve as to the plan by which he intends to carry out his Home-rule scheme, if he wins the next General Election, as " the confidence trick," and saying that he and his friends desire to know "under which thimble the pea is." It seems to us a great mistake in Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues not to adopt a franker policy, though we believe that their reserve is in a great degree due to thoroughly divided counsels, —one party, containing Mr. Morley, and, we believe, Lord Spencer, greatly objecting to a grand federal scheme, and another party, headed by Mr. Gladstone and supported by the junior members of his party, warmly supporting such a scheme. But even if the reserve be deliberate, which we greatly doubt, there is no vestige of swindling in it, and it is a great blunder to exacerbate party differences which are already bitter enough, by the use of language imputing bad faith to oppo- nents. Sir Richard Webster is both too good and too moderate a man to have made such a mistake deliberately. No doubt the temptation to make the worst of his opponents' reserve came upon him suddenly in the course of his speech. But he should have resisted it.
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