Sir William Harcourt united a furious attack on Lord Salisbury
to his attack on Mr. Chamberlain. Lord Salis- bury's attitude towards the rural labourers was, he said, very like the attitude of a Southern planter towards Negro suffrage. Again, Lord Salisbury reminded him of the attitude taken up by Front de Bceuf towards a Saxon churL "School-rooms," he said, "are they not the fortresses of the squire and the parson ? Shall Radical Nonconformists invade them? A living Radical in a school-room is almost as bad as a dead Nonconformist in a churchyard," and so on, and so on. Sir William Harcourt's whole effort was to suggest that insolence and spite represent the whole policy of Lord Salisbury, and also of the House of Lords, towards the rural labourers. All we can say is that if it be so, insolence and spite are not only willing, but even anxious, to give the rural labourer a very great and abrupt en- largement of his local influence. Sir William Harcourt does not at all encourage the idea of an immediate Dissolution. On the contrary, he wants to get as many popular Bills as may be mutilated by the Lords, before
proposing to strike, and evidently would like best te see the Lords wavering over their policy, and shrinking back from it, rather than that the Gladstonians should be allotted the delicate task of drawing up and passing the constitutional reform which is to shunt the House of Lords from its present place and functions. On that subject Sir William Harcourt is mysteriously silent.
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