Sir Wilfrid Lawson made a very sharp attack on the
Govern- meat in his speech at Cockermouth on Monday. The plea fora scientific frontier, he said, was a plea for robbery, neither sore nor less. The first well-known ruler who wanted to rectify his frontier in this way was Ahab, and his rectification of it at the expense of Naboth, was an operation of precisely the some kind as Lord Beaconsfield's. He called the burning of the Afghan mountaineers' villages, and the slaughter of the mountaineers themselves, on the frontier, "the most atrocious massacring of human beings that ever was heard of." He described the invasion of Zululand as one "brought about by the most treacherous and meanest devices on our part, and the injustice and brutality of which are perfectly amazing." He could not with- hold his meed of praise from the Zulus, for the gallantry with which they were defending their country against a
most unjustifiable invasion. He asked, " Who is to stop all this wickedness ?" and his answer was that only the country
could stop it. The aristocracy would not; Parliament would not; the Church would not, for, with many noble exceptions, the Bishops of the Church seemed, to him, to act more like " priests of Baal, than servants of the Prince of Peace." There is no jocosity in all that, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson was, for once, evidently in grim earnest. Yet his view seems to us more or less distorted. You can seldom justly put the immorality of unjust wars and the immorality of private murders and robberies on the same moral basis. The wrongness in each case is a wrongness of totally differentquality and origin, and heartily as we agree in the main political drift of Sir Wilfrid Lawson's observations, we do not think that anything is gained—indeed, much is lost—by identi. fying the moral offence of men who make war on insufficient grounds, with those of men who rob and kill for their private advantage.
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