It might have been supposed that the King's very striking
speech, in which there is not a word which can fairly be said to encourage party feeling or to indicate that the King is taking sides, would have been accepted with satisfaction by all reasonable people. Strange as it may seem, however, it was greeted with what can only be described as an outburst of angry recrimination by a large section of the Radical Press, the Daily News, the Daily Chronicle, and the Manchester Guardian being exoeptionally vehement. As if they desired to give proof of the truth of Bacon's luciferous saying, that "suspicion clouds the mind," they seized hold of the words in the King's speech : "To-day the cry of civil war is on the lips of the most responsible and sober-minded of my people," and made this plain and perfectly legitimate statement of an obvious fact the excuse for an attack upon the Sovereign for having exceeded his constitutional rights. The Unionists are the people who have had "the cry of civil war on their lips." Therefore the King has described the Unionists as the most responsible and sober-minded of his people. Therefore the King is taking sides with the Unionists and is attacking his own Ministers. Such was the amazing logic of the Radical publicists.
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