Mr. Goschen went on to show what hardly needed showing,
that he had not shown Mr. Gladstone any personal ingratitude in deserting him when Mr. Gladstone adopted Home-rule; that he had never been disloyal to Free-trade; that he had not been half as willing to cast away revenue for paying off debt when he lowered the Income-tax last year by a penny, as Mr. Gladstone was himself in 1874, when he proposed to abolish the Income-tax en bloc; and that if he had resigned because he did not like the compulsory clause in the Allotments Act of last Session, he would have been altogether disloyal to the great Unionist cause he had adopted. He reminded Mr. Gladstone that he himself had taken power in 1886 by virtue of a resolution of Mr. Jesse Collings's in relation to allotments which he carried against the Conservative Government, and that he had shelved the resolni- tion the moment he bad formed an Administration ; indeed, that he had afterwards spoken of Mr. Jesse Collings, who was a member of his own Government, as "a certain" Mr. Jesse
Collings who was understood to wish to give the labourers three acres and a cow. In short, Mr. Goschen replied to Mr. Gladstone's Dover attack upon him adequately enough, though we wish that there were a great deal less of this sort of personal fencing in our politics.
