Mr. Forster and Mr. John Morley also spoke at Leeds
on Satur- day. Mr. Forster laughed at the Tory demand for a Dissolution on a subject, the Franchise Bill, which everybody professed to be agreed about, and said the object was to avoid hearing the opinion of the new 60 per cent, of voters. The Peers were sub- mitting the country to a tremendous Constitutional struggle simply for that. They were complaining that the country forgot foreign and Colonial affairs, yet were doing their ut- most to induce it to forget them. They were not dishonest, but they were acting from more partisan feeling than they acknowledged. Mr. John Morley, whose brilliant speech at Newcastle,—the best he ever made,—we are ashamed to have passed over, pressed the case more sharply against the House of Lords. He would assent to compromise only if they gave up their claim to force a Dissolution, and passed the Franchise Bill. It was a shame that the Govern- ment should be asked to make the Redistribution Bill acceptable to the Lords. He fully admitted that dark days might be ahead, that foreign questions grew pressing, that Parliament needed reinvigorating, that Ireland was still a menacing pro- blem, but he saw in those things new reasons for the closer union of all classes upon the basis of a common citizenship.
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