Sir William Harcourt made a speech against the Government at
Bromley on Wednesday, attacking them at all points at which he thought that they were vulnerable, He began with the Sugar. Bountiesmeasure, predicting that if measures were taken to keep out bounty-fed sugar, France would retaliate by putting higher duties on English manufactures which are not bounty- fed. Then he spoke of the Naval Defence measure as pro- ceeding from a "manufactured scare," and treated all these manufactured scares as causing pleasurable excitement, but at the same time excitement which is of a very expensive kind. Then he charged Mr. Goschen with having stolen the money for this manufactured scare from the fund which ought to have gone to the reduction of the Debt,—though he knew very well that no Minister in recent times has done half as much for the reduction of the Debt as Mr. Goschen,—and finally he slid into abuse of the Liberal Unionists, of whom he spoke as "neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, nor good red-herring." In other words, he attacked them for their co-operation with the Tories, though it is a co-operation only in regard to a policy with which, as he had to admit, he had identified himself wholly up to the moment of Mr. Gladstone's change. It follows, therefore, that between 1870 and 1885, Sir William Harcourt himself was neither fish nor flesh nor fowl, nor good red-herring,—a description which applies to him at the present time much more pertinently, we think, than it did then.
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