Lord Salisbury made another striking speech at a banquet at
the Hotel Cecil on Thursday night, in which, in reference to Lord Rosebery's last political utterance, he declared that for good or for evil the Liberal party of 1886 had passed away for ever. "The past is never reproduced. You may come back to analogous results, you may obtain some of the conditions, or even all of them, which you enjoyed before, but when the method, the system, the circumstances by which those results were obtained are once shattered they can never be reproduced." That is true, but it applies quite as much tO the old Conserva- tive party. It also is not the same party that it was before 1886. The Conservative party has become in the best and widest ssnse of the word liberalised. We are not so foolish as to imagine that this is solely due to the influence of the Liberal Unionists. The process had begun long before the alliance, and was due to the development of forces always to some extent represented in the party. At the same time, the year 1886 made these developments visible, and so marks an epoch in the evolution. of both parties. At present a man who is classed as a Tory is quite as likely to hold wide and liberal views as a man officially described as a Liberal.
Previous page
