We hope, then, that Mr. Asquith, sagacious student of politics
as he is, will not forget that his supporters on this occasion were a mixed assembly. He receives an instruction to keep the Govern-
ment in order and to the point in the House of Commons, but he is not instructed to press his own form of Liberalism a outrance, particularly in the case of Ireland. The state of Ireland is far too grave for a responsible statesman with a mixed body of supporters behind him to content himself with the old Liberal catchwords about Ireland, which are sometimes doctrinaire and sometimes petulant, but are never clarifying. Perhaps Mr.
Asquith's majority is a little too large for our liking, but that does not matter beside the main satisfactory fact that Mr. Asquith has been elected at a moment when his great experience
and his high critical faculties are urgently needed in Parliament. Frankly, we agree with Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Chaplin, who, though Unionists, wrote to Mr. Asquith to wish him success.
