On Tuesday, the Duke of Rutland made a gallant little
attack on the reply of Lord Derby to Prince GortachakofPs Circular, a, few hours before his brother, Lord John Manners, spoke in de- fenee of the Government in the House of Commons. He pointed out the imprudence and onesidedness of the despatch, the dis- may, if we may trust the evidence of telegrams in the Daily News of Tuesday, which it had produced in Europe, and the patience Russia had shown in endeavouring to wring concessions out of Turkey which Turkey had contemptuously refused. He justified Mr. Gladstone's autumn agitation, and showed that Great Britain had thrown over united Europe before ever Russia did so, when we rejected the Berlin Memorandum. Lord Derby's reply showed great irritation with the Duke of Rutland, and great acrimony against the Daily News. The correspondence of the Daily Telegraph, as he had told the House of Lords a week or two ago, is almost always founded on fact, but now he replied that as for the communications to the Daily News, if the Duke of Rut- land thought he could estimate the policy of her Majesty's Govern- ment on the strength of statements contained in that paper, why he was " not so much surprised that his conclusions are such as he has described." Hereupon Lord Granville opportunely remarked that it was the incredulity of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary last year as to the correspondence in the Daily News, which got them into so much trouble for treating the accounts of the horrors in Bulgaria as " coffee-house babble." Nevertheless, Lord Derby does not seem to accord so much im- portance to subsequent verification, as he does to that " verify- ing faculty " in his own mind which compels him to give in his adhesion to the eloquence of the Daily Telegraph.
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