On this day week, which was "Election-day" - at Merchant Taylors'
School, otherwise the day on which the elections to the exhibitions at the Universities are publicly announced and the annual feast held, .various great personages made after-dinner speeches, of which only one, however, Lord Stanley's, had any poli- tical significance. The Bishop. of Oxford, bursting into generous hyperbole, talked of the Merchant Taylors' Association and its brother societies as "healing fountains in the midst of a dry land,"—oases in the Sahara of life. Is it because the great guilds are the sources of great dinners, whose healing fountains flow with wine? Lord Stanley, in replying to the toast of the Howe of Commons, gave the Tory malcontents a significant hint. The longer he had known the House of Commons, he said, the more respect he had gained for its opinions and decisions. Even during the last three years, though it had done little, it had maintained "a judicious inactivity." Real grievances are never, he says, neglected, and so long as this is so, and we have "the good sense to keep at peace with our neighbours," no agitation would be formidable. Lord Stanley is evidently not warlike either in the Dano-German quarrel or in the Conservative versus Liberal quarrel. He can rest and be thankful, even "under the most creditable circum- stances," i. e., when he himself is in opposition, and the name of England is in deserved discredit.
