NEWS OF THE WEEK.
T is no easy -task to follow the ramifications of the I- Election campaign, in so far as it has yet developed.
When we wrote last week the position was that Mr. Bald- win's fateful words" in the Plymouth, the Swansea, and the Manchester speeches had at a single blow reunited the Liberal Party, and had revealed a new crack in the Conservative bloc. It seenied possible that the Con- servative Party might have to go to the constituencies in three distinct sections, mutually friendly perhaps, but far from united. On the one hand, the old Coalitionist rump of Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, and perhaps Lord Balfour and Sir Robert Horne, was still unreconciled ; on the other, the traditional 'Unionist Free Traders, such as Lord Salisbury, Lord Derby, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Robert Cecil, were obviously lukewarm in their support of the Baldwin proposals. *
