Mr. Chaplin made a sensible speech at Ashby-de-la-Launde, in Lincolnshire,
on Tuesday. He replied to Mr. John Morley's Lincolnshire speech, showing that it was not the defeat of the Government in the Spalding Division of Lincolnshire that had spurred them on to bringing in last year's Allotments Bill, since it had not only been promised in the Queen's Speech of February, 1887, bat had been promised again in June, 1887. (Mr. Chaplin, however, ought to admit that whereas in June, 1887, the Allotments Bill was certainly spoken of as likely to be postponed to 1888, the Spalding election did in all probability hasten it.) He also contrasted the depreciatory and grudging manner in which Mr. Morley spoke of the Local Government Act after it was papsed, with the generous appreciation of it expressed by the Gladstonian Under-Secretary for the Home Office, Mr. Henry Fowler (M.P. for Wolverhampton), when he said "It is very gratifying to be able to congratulate the House of Commons on the fact that this, which is one of the greatest measures of modern times, has not given rise to any such [bitter party] feelings in its passage through this Assembly. It is not a final measure—the right hon. gentleman himself does not pretend that it is—but it is the first volume of a mighty work and the foundation of a great policy." How, asked Mr. Chaplin, did that tally with Mr. Morley's views? As for the failure to divide the rates between the occupiers and owners, the Government had accepted that division heartily in principle, but could not possibly have embodied the principle in the present Bill, without recasting the whole measure. But they were pledged to adopt it, and as for Mr. Gladstone's Government, it had had many oppor- tunities of embodying it in legislation, and had always neglected to do so. Mr. Chaplin's speech was Liberal throughout,—which is a great change for the better in him. He has apparently dropped his obsolete Protectionism.
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