Lord Rosebery made a bright and humorous speech at Lincoln
on Tuesday. He quizzed the two parties into which the Government are divided,—the party of Mr. Chamberlain, which is nakedly Protectionist, and the party of Mr. Balfour, which supports Mr. Chamberlain, but professes all the while to believe in "a new and Protectionist Free-trade." Their. opponents were considered dull dogs, and he himself was the dullest of all, for he could not understand either Mr. Cham- berlain or Mr. Balfour. As for treating Free-trade as an open question, "you might as well treat arithmetic as an open- question." Mr. Chamberlain had a hundred and ninety-eight followers in this Parliament, but how many would he have in the next, when at every election candidates declared themselves sympathisera with him but not his sup-- porters? As to his statement that the Colonies had offered us preferences on condition of special concessions, he found that in Canada, at any rate, as witness the recent history of the milling and woollen industries, manufacturers were de- manding protection against imports from Great Britain. He thought that Mr. Chamberlain's Imperialism was only empiricism, and that when he offered cheaper tea and tobacco as compensation for dearer bread, or talked of music as a luxury which, if the people had Protection, they would buy more of, he was leaving the region of statesmanship for that of farce. That "was not the way to raise great Imperial issues."
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