Mr. Chamberlain made a vigorous speech at Birmingham .on Thursday,
but the vigour was decidedly more aggressive than it needed to be, and, to our thinking, than it should have been. "Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule policy was conceived in secrecy, was born in deceit, and has been nurtured in evasion," is not a sentence that, to our mind, at all correctly describes the almost childlike anxiety of diplomacy, and simple-minded
determination not to be rash, which ushered in the great avowal of Home-rule views. And hard words like these do leave very bitter memories behind them. It is the same with Mr. Chamberlain's- comment on the certainly extraordinary comparison which has, he tells us, been made between Mr. Parnell and George Washington. It is as absurd a compari- son as could be made, but Mr. Chamberlain's comment upon it was not as wise as it might have been. Still, nothing could be more effective as hard-hitting, if it had been a case where hard-hitting was desirable; and Mr. Chamberlain's demonstra- tion that Mr. Parnell had positively asked for not only such a Land Bill as Mr. Balfour offers, but the pledge of such Irish securities as that Bill provides against the defalcation of tenants in the payment of instalments, will go a long way to show the country how little principle and how much vin- dictiveness there is in the Parnellite opposition to the Bill. There is no public orator who speaks with more coherence and force than Mr. Chamberlain, but the force is apt to be a little too savage. Probably the malignant attacks made upon him by the Gladstonians are more or less answerable for the szva indignatio of his retorts.
