Mr. Goschen made perhaps the best speech of the year
in the Town Hall at Birmingham on Wednesday. We have contrasted its policy with that of Mr. Morley's speech at Clerkenwell in another column, and have pointed out some of its leading features, so that here we will refer only to portions of the speech not elsewhere mentioned. The watchwords of his Government were, he said, " Democracy, Unity, and Order ;" while the Gladstonian Liberals, though as zealous for democracy, were not zealous for unity and order in any sense in which unity and order are understood by practical men. He illustrated this indifference by Mr. Gladstone's recent speeches on Ireland, of which Birmingham had had, not, indeed, the original design, but what might be called an " artist's proof," while the House of Commons had only been permitted to see a common print. But whatever rhetorical embellishment these various forms of the speech received, the subject was nothing but " Remember Mitchelstown !" after all ; and when this was discovered, Mr. Gladstone's hearers were as disappointed as the Sunday-school children who, having been excited by a splendid description of the Nile and the Egyptian buildings on its banks, found out that the whole glowing picture ended in nothing newer than "Moses in the Bulrushes " after all. Even Sir William Harcourt could not save the Mitehelstown romance from the demolition with which Mr. Balfour met it, though, said Mr. Goschen, that great evicted ex-tenant of the Home Office sallied out of the but of the Campaign in which he now dwells, to support Mr. Gladstone.
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