Sir George Trevelyan also delivered one of his panegyrics on
Liberalism and invectives against Liberal Unionism at Pem- broke, in which he testified that the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists are now working side by side with extraordinary energy, the object being, in Sir George Trevelyan's opinion, to suck the life-blood out of Liberalism. "It is not very easy for any true Liberal to see how, when he gives a vote to a Tory, he is not voting for his opinions altogether." The reply, of course, is that he is voting for the new Conservatism altogether,—but that the new Conservatism is Toryism with its fangs drawn by household suffrage, and that Conservatism of that kind is far preferable to Radicalism with the new anarchical and disruptionist bias. Mr. Brodrick (the Warden of Merton), in his admirable Unionist speech at Oxford on the same day, told a story of one of the Free Church ministers at the time of the Disruption, who had prayed, "0 Lord ! pour out upon us more abundantly the spirit of disruption ;" but even such a minister as that would hardly find it needful to ask for a more abundant grace of disruption than we have supplied to us now both in England and Ireland, and to Sir George Trevelyan there seems to have been granted a special unction for diffusing its blessings. At the same Oxford meeting, Mr. Finlay dwelt on a remark of Lord Herschell's, made at Edinburgh on Tuesday, that a united Empire was not destroyed by giving to each of our Colonies the blessing of self-government ; from which Mr. Finlay justly argued that this would be the final form of Home-rule in Ireland,—the independence of a self-governing Colony, which is, in fact, independence at will.
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