The Prime Minister's speech at the Guildhall this day week
was neither so important as was expected, nor so amusing as was desired. The anticipation of it by a " Clairvoyant," in the Echo of the same day, was indeed much the more lively speech of the two. Lord Beaconsfield told us, to every one surprise, that the object of the Afghan war is to procure for us a " scientific frontier,"—in short, to get Shere Ali to do for India what Lord Beaconsfield asks the Sultan to do for Greece. On the subject of the Treaty of Berlin, Lord Beaconsfield was grandly self-congratulatory. He remarked that "the govern- ment of the world is carried on by Sovereigns and statesmen, and not by anonymous paragraph-writers, or the harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity." It is a much-disputed question whether the latter thunderbolt was launched at the Lord Chief Baron, who, earlier in the day, had accused Russia, in a bombastic speech, of disregarding and violating her engagements under that treaty, or at Sir William Harcourt's speech at Scarborough. It applied much better to the former than to the latter address, but was probably intended rather for the latter than the former, as representing a more formidable critic. According to Lord Beaconsfield, everything is going as well under the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin as the most sanguine statesman could desire ; and if so, so much the better for England, because Lord Beaconsfield has now appealed to the people of this country to support his Government in maintaining "to the letter and to the complete spirit" the stipulations of that Treaty. In other words, we suppose, we are to go to war, rather than let Bulgaria join bands with Ronmelia, as Wallachia joined hands with Moldavia after the Treaty of 1856. We might almost as well pledge ourselves to go to war to prevent a cargo of gunpowder from taking fire when a lighted match is put to it, or to prevent two neighbouring gases, separated only by a thin membrane, from mingling with each other.
