Mr. Chamberlain on Thursday made an important and resolute speech
at Heywood, the pith of which may be con- densed into two or three sentences. He maintained that Lord Rosebery was " making game" of the people by pro. raising what he himself admitted he could not perform, and compared Ministers to an assembly of Shakespeare's witches, who threw drug after drug into the caldron of agitation—each drug being an item in the New\ astle programme—and when the caldron did not bubble, put forward the chief witch, who, with words of awful but unintelligible import dropped in— a Resolution, Mr. Chamberlain contrasted with this wretched policy his own, which was to advance on a course of construc- tive legislation; to try the Gothenburg system of dealing with liquor; to extend the Artisans Dwellings Act so that poor men could buy their houses ; to facilitate the provision of pensions for old age ; to establish tribunals of arbitration ; to regulate alien immigration; and to carry a large and final measure of compensation for accident, based upon the principle of insurance. These are far better offers than those of the Newcastle programme ; but Mr. Chamber. lain must beware of multiplying them too fast. We can no more carry half a dozen social Bills in any one Session than half a dozen political Bills, They will involve enormous expenditure, and perhaps new taxation, and will not, we may be almost certain, be supported by both parties in the State, The "Socialists" hate all these "alleviations of a poverty which ought to be cured."
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