Lord Rosebery, who followed with an address of remark- able
brilliancy, commented severely on a. passage in a speech recently made in Edinburgh by Mr. B. R. Wise,
late Attorney-General for New South Wales. Mr. Wise had not only contended that Mr. Cobden, had he been alive, would have been one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of Mr. Chamberlain, but also declared that there was not a man occupying a prominent position in any of the self-governing Colonies who was not in favour of Mr. Chamberlain's policy. The other party—i.e., the Liberals —bad no policy but that of stagnation and drift, and were wholly out of sympathy with Imperial ideas and ignorant of Imperial aspirations. Lord Rosebery con- demned the taste shown by Mr. Wise in coming thirteen thousand miles from Australia, where he had been a Minister of the Crown, to stigmatise one of the great political parties in such terms. As for stagnation, the activity of the Welsh and the Irish party, of the Labour wing and of the English Nonconformists, inclined him to think that " when my old friend Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman returns from his well- earned holiday to take the command of the Liberal party, the last epithet he will think of applying to it will be stagnant."
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