20 JANUARY 1872, Page 3

We have criticized the greater part of Mr. Fawcett's speech

carefully elsewhere, and will here only add that he drew a very useful lesson from the spectacle now before us of the Law officers of the Crown engaged night and day in private business of their own, instead of in preparing the necessary Law reforms for the Government they serve ; and that after denouncing the finan- cial mismanagement of India, and exhorting Parliament and the people to take some interest in Indian reforms,— a case, we greatly fear, where only a little knowledge is really more dangerous than none,—he referred to the kind assurances he received of being turned out at the next election, and told with some humour the compliment paid to him by a Government official, who had said that a general election would at least be attended by one advantage, in excluding Mr. Fawcett from the House of Commons. The meeting gave no sign of agreeing with the Government official, but we wish, for his own sake, that Mr. Fawcett would treat Mr. Gladstone's Government less as if it were a creature of Satan, and he a rebuking angel of light.