Though the subject of debate was so dull, Monday evening
was marked by a very disagreeable incident. Mr. Gibson Bowles thought fit to pay off old scores by making a personal attack on the Ministry of great violence. He spoke ironically of the possibility that the Treasury Bench might some day be. occupied by a Minister who was " a revolutionary, or a cynic, with so great a contempt for people and Parliament that, having appealed to the country to give him a large majority and having got it, he might use it for the aggrandisement of his own family and seek to confirm his position by a liberal dispensing of the public taxes among his own supporters." He expected to be rebuked by the First Lord of the Treasury for what he had said, "but there were some critics of the Government on the Government benches who had work-a-day notions of honour of their own. They would not ask a general to rewrite his despatch, or even a Committee to rewrite its Report. They would not sacrifice their country to their party, or their party to their family, or as much as the efficiency of a single Department to the urgency of a relative." We are by no means thick-and-thin supporters of the present Ministry, and hold that there is much to criticise in their action, but we confess that attacks of the kind indulged in by Mr. Bowles are as disgusting to us in their truculent vulgarity as in their injustice and want of truth. The Ministry may be apathetic, but to insinuate that they are dishonoured jobbers is grossly untrue and unfair. Mr. Balfour most wisely did not deign to answer his assailant— one does not throw back dead cats—but passed by the attack with only a contemptuous reference. In refusing Mr. Bowles's muddy gage of battle he received the general sympathy of the House.
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