We have had a great many very unauthentic but minute
statements this week as to the actual grounds of quarrel between Lord Randolph Churchill and the Prime Minister. Lord Salis- bury has been represented as declining to insist on reductions in the Navaland Military Estimates, which, in the opinion of the Ministers responsible for the Navy and Army, would leave
England in real peril at a very critical moment. Lord Randolph, on the other hand, is asserted to have had many differences with his chief, first on the Bulgarian Question, in which he is said to have prevailed against the policy which might have drawn us into war with Russia ; next, on putting down the National League in Ireland ; and thirdly, on the narrower or broader view of the Local Government Bill. All these differences came to a head when he insisted on redactions which Lord George Hamilton and Mr. Smith held to be impossible without crippling the services, Lord Randolph, it is said, even maintaining that the grant for fortifying the coaling-stations in our Colonies and Dependencies ought to be sacrificed in order to reduce the Esti- mates, and enable him to lower the Income-tax and the Tea- duties. All these minute accounts of confidential statements are, of course, conjectural; while the absurd sketch to which we have been treated, of the conditions on which Lord Randolph would return to the Cabinet, which include submission to the Russian policy in the Balkans, is more like a contribution to Punch than to a serious political journal.
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