On Saturday last Mr. Gladstone delivered a speech to the
Southwark Liberal Association, in the Drill Hall, Bermondsey, and after speaking of the duty of organisation, and the emergency which should induce Liberals to sink their various differences as much as possible, he went on to remark on the difference between Tory Governments which lived "on Liberal charity doled out to them from day to day," and a Tory Government backed by "a
perfectly inflexible and impenetrable majority," and opposed by a comparatively feeble and divided Liberal party. The Tories, thus backed and opposed, had calmly raised the question whether or not the English were to be governed, their future pledged and com- promised, their engagements enormously extended, and the neces- sity for taxation vastly increased, "not ouly without their assent, but without their knowledge ;" and not merely even without their knowledge, but with the utmost expenditure of pains to keep the truth from them, till all the arrangements had been completed for burdening them, without remedy, with the care of a new conti- nent, in the utmost state of disorganisation, at the distance of two or three thousand miles. "I venture to say," declared Mr. Glad- stone, "that there is not in Europe a Government,—no, not even a despotic Government," that would have dared to do the like. The covenant to defend Asia Minor, Mr. Gladstone pronounced deliber- ately an "insane covenant." Of all the statesmen he had known,— the Duke of Wellington, Sir R. Peel, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Lansdowne,—" not one would have been in- duced to put his name to such an arrangement." Mr. Gladstone also characterised the recent Anglo-Turkish arrangement, reserved from the Powers at the time when we were keeping all Europe in hot- water on the ground that the whole of the new engagements between Russia and Turkey should be brought frankly before the Congress at Berlin, as an act of "duplicity," " not surpassed, and I believe rarely equalled, in the history of nations." Of course, Mr. Glad- stone does not see that it is really only Russian duplicity which is base ; that British duplicity is like the duplicity of Ulysses,—mere fertility of counsel.
