Sir Wilfrid Lawson delivered one of his amusing bits of
chaff on Wednesday, at the dinner of the Wigton Agricultural Show. He said that party politics were no longer so unreasonably bitter as they used to be, that he did not think there would be many to charge the present Administration with the floods of July ; for himself, he was quite confident that it was not any act of Mr. Ward Hunt's which sent the ' Vanguard ' to the bottom ; nor did he ascribe the foot-and-mouth epidemic to any deep design of Mr. Disraeli's. He was waiting anxiously to know from the papers on which side of the struggle in Turkey—the Turkish or the Christian side—the honour of the country was pledged. At present the papers did not tell him. But as soon as they did, he would get excited, and say, with the rest of the world, that the honour of England depended on our taking one side or the other,—he did not care a straw which. Sir Wilfrid's sarcasm is generally good, but we will that, with all his good. nature, his political mind were not so utterly cynical His Radicalism is all pococurantism—" don't care "—in disguise ; indeed his interest in the Teetotal question hardly comes to more than this,—that it is at least clear that a sober man is worth more than a drunken man, and in a world in which the moral and political alternatives are so little worth choosing between, that is, at least, a tangible point. If Sir Wilfrid cared more for other moral and political distinctions, he would probably care less for teetotalism.
Previous page
