Sir W. Harcourt has written, and published, a characteristic letter
on the election in East Dorset. It is addressed nominally to the candidate, and assures all agricultural labourers that "Collin is the friend, not Short." The Liberal Party, he says, secured the labourer the vote, brought forward the allotment question, and has always treated the labourer as an equal, instead of a dependant to be patronised. It is working for him now, and "when the village communities are invested with a real, living, effective organisation, which can dispose of allotments of their own to their own people in their own right, which can look after the education of their own children, see to the disposal of their own charitable endow- ments, their rights a common, and all other matters of their own local concern, rural life will become a very different thing from what it now is. It will be inspired with better hopes and higher aims." And, therefore, villagers are to vote that all
these things may be neglected for the sake of giving Irishmen Home-rule ! We do not wish to be hard upon Sir W. Harcourt, for he is only a little more brutally frank than the Unionists in bidding for labourers' support ; but he conceals what he of all men must remember, that in all that Liberals did for the agriculturists, those who are now Liberal Unionists took a leading part. They have altered none of their views about the labourers, and their chiefs must have assented to the measures of relief which Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour have already foreshadowed.
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