20 JANUARY 1906, Page 2

The " land-slide " continued on Monday, when two more

ex-Ministers—Mr. Gerald Balfour and Mr. Walter Long— were defeated, and 41 more seats were captured by the Liberals. In London all the divisions of St. Pancras were captured; Brixton, Kennington, and North Lambeth returned Liberals for the first time, and three Conserva- tive seats were captured in Islington; and both divisions of West Ham returned Liberals. In the provinces the rout was equally pronounced, two seats being won in each case at Bath, Leeds, and Bristol. Throughout the Opposition did best in the small boroughs, and while Mr. George Wyndham, the soundness of whose Unionism had been so gravely called in question, was returned for Dover, Mr. Walter Long, the pillar of Unionist orthodoxy, was rejected in Bristol. Other notable results of Monday's polling were the rejection of Mr. Bowles at King's Lynn and of Lord Hugh Cecil at Greenwich, in each case the seat being lost to Unionism by the opposition of a Tariff Reform candidate. Lord Hugh Cecil's defeat is a matter of no little regret, but we cannot wonder that the ordinary voter did not understand how a candidate could denounce Mr. Chamberlain and yet express his loyalty to Mr. Balfour, while all the time Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour were allowing it to be understood that they were acting in unison.