On Monday, Sir Stafford Northcote replied, at Carnarvon, to an
address from the Conservative Associations of the six counties of North Wales, and attempted to comfort them for their small success in imbuing that country with Conservative views by representing that, though Wales is certainly not Con- servative, yet, by all the principles of traditional usage, it cer- tainly ought to be so. Wales was the cradle of the British Empire ; long before the Norman, or the Saxon, or the Roman set his foot on these shores, Wales was inhabited by the same race living there now, the race that is the parent stock of the British. Such traditions and the pride of such an ancestry ought to make Wales thoroughly Conservative ; and if they did not, it must be, Sir Stafford Northcote held, because Conserva- tive principles had been misrepresented by Liberal prejudice, and perhaps even to some extent because Conservatives them- selves had proved to be deficient in sympathy with the great mass of the people. Sir Stafford insisted greatly on the magic power of sympathy, and appealed to Welshmen to combine their Conservative pride in an ancient lineage and a proud history with warm national sympathies, which would popularise that pride and subordinate it to the service of the nation. He warned the Welsh solemnly against the Radicals who asked them to invest in schemes of which it could only be said that, like one of the South Sea bubble companies, "the nature of it was to be disclosed hereafter." Unfortunately, that description applies much more strikingly to the policy of Lord Beaconsfield than to the policy of Mr. Gladstone. Even the late Lord Derby described the greatest of his domestic measures as "a leap in the dark," while the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield was an even greater leap into a thicker darkness.
