Mr. Goschen made a remarkable speech at Glasgow on Wednesday,
of which a considerable portion was devoted to the vindication of his finance against the rash and ignorant criticisms of Dr. Cameron, one of the Members for Glasgow (for the College Division), who has been directing against it many criticisms for which Mr. Gladstone would be very sorry, we imagine, to be asked to find apologies, or even excuses. To this part of his speech we have directed atten- tion in another column, and need not refer further to it here. But Mr. Goschen also replied to Sir William Har- court's satire on the divided policy of the Conservatives at Birmingham in relation to the Irish Local Government Bill, by pointing out that the Liberals at Newcastle would have been equally divided, had they not been carefully gagged by the arrangements of the executive. He quoted from a letter of a delegate to the Newcastle Chronicle :— " I have attended many public gatherings, but never one conducted on these autocratic lines. A number of resolutions drawn up in secret conclave by the executive are submitted, one by one, to the assembly, nominally for its approval and ratification, which resolutions, by-the-way, are carefully kept from every one's knowledge until the delegates enter the hall, and then in each case, the instant the official speakers have concluded, without one moment's pause, without even asking whether any delegate desired to offer remarks in a contrary sense, the resolution was rushed through." No wonder that another delegate, a working man, described the whole Con- ference at Newcastle, in the vulgar slang of the day, as "a blooming plant," and that we are assured that "scores of Asso- ciations which last year at Sheffield saw and experienced what we have here and now experienced, refused to send delegates." That does not look as if the policy of the Gladstonhins just now were a policy of what Mr. Gladstone calls " emancipa- tion." On the contrary, it looks like a policy of democratic dragooning.
