'LORD ROSEBERY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sni,—As one of those who for many years have thoroughly appreciated the soundness of your views on most public questions, and the courage and skill with which you have maintained them, I hope that you will forgive me for demurring a little to your article upon Lord Rosebery's speech at the City Liberal Club. I do not think that his object in making that speech is very far to seek. It seems to me that he was appealing, and very powerfully—not, per- haps, to Liberal Unionists—still less to Socialistic Radicals— but to that large body of true Liberals who are to be found in every constituency, who are neither noisy nor self- assertive, and so, perhaps, have been a little neglected ; who have never joined either the Conservatives or the Gladstonian Radicals, and who rejoice in the name which Mr. Gladstone himself gave them, "Dissentient Liberals." To these men there are still important questions awaiting their solution, sooner or later, at the hands of Liberals, and which before the Liberal party was debauched afforded abundant scope for the exercise of its ambition,—I mean religious equality ; retrenchment which should bring the cost of government and defence well within the nation's means, without our having recourse to any Socialistic expedient whatever ; reform of the House of Lords which will perpetuate as well as justify its powers. These (not Home-rule, Local Option, and so forth) are some of the questions to which Dissentient Liberals are looking to reinstate the Liberal party ; and the time may come, even before all of us old men have passed away, when that check to trade which is not far off will have taught the nation the lesson that temporary prosperity and the itch to please the voting crowd are no excuse for divorcing taxation from representation ; and when some revival of religious independence will have taught the Church that that bundle of sects which we call the Church of England cannot be artificially held together by the efforts of either Bishops or Archbishops, but must resolve itself into its natural elements, if men are ever to dare to be free.—I am,
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