A meeting held at the Westminster Palace Hotel on Monday,
to discuss the best means of defeating Lord Sandon's Bill, gave very fair evidence of the way the wind is blowing in the Liberal party. Hardly a single speaker failed to exult over the effect which this slap in the face was producing on the relaxed nerve of the Liberal party, and Mr. John Morley went so far as to say that if Lord Sandon's Bill could not be defeated, it should not be whittled away, but passed intact, for that the Liberals ought not to take any part in making the measure less instructive as to the significance of Tory policy than it is, or in diminishing the justification which they would themselves gain thereby at some future period, for reviving again the whole question of endowments in a thoroughly radical sense. The difficulty, however, of acting on such advice is, that it involves, when you come to actual deliberation, some- thing like insincerity. A man cannot refuse to support or accept a substantial diminution of an evil he regards as very grave, on the ground that he wants a justification for a more root-and- branch policy in the future, without lowering his own weight, and helping to diminish the earnestness of Parliamentary life. To vote confessedly for the greater evil, rather than the less, on whatever ground, is virtually to commit political suicide.
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