Sir Algernon West, recently relieved from the restrictions on a
permanent official in the Inland Revenue, is indulging in all the delights of party license. In agitating against Mr. St. John Brodrick's candidature in West Surrey, he told a public meeting the other day how he had himself listened to the deafening cheers of the Tory Party when a Parliamentary orator described the working man as " venal, ignorant, and drunken ; " and the Surrey Times, in its report, made Sir Algernon West twice attribute this speech to a Tory " orator. When asked to substantiate his statement, Sir Algernon West referred to the pro/Ser place in Hansard's reports of Parlia- mentary debates, without mentioning by whom the speech was delivered ; but Mr. Brodrick, on looking it up, discovered that it was Mr. Lowe's, delivered in 1866, and naturally resented this description of Mr. Lowe as a Tory. Sir Algernon West now denies that he spoke of it as a Tory speech, though he had not previously called in question the accuracy of the Surrey Times' report, and he intimates that his comment applied only to the -vehement cheering with which Mr. Lowe's attack on the working man was received on the Tory side of the House. Well, then, why did he not frankly confess at first that the speech was the speech of a Whig, though it delighted the Tories ? We suppose because he justly thought that it would show that the Liberals did not particularly resent that kind of attack on the working man, since Mr. Lowe afterwards became Mr. Gladstone's Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir
Algernon did not wish to use a weapon against the Tories which might be snatched out of his hand and turned against the Liberals. That was prudent on the part of Sir Algernon West, but certainly more prudent than candid. It was a tricky manoeuvre, which probably increased Mr. Brodrick's majority.
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