Lord Rosebery made a speech at Airdrie, near Glasgow, yesterday
week, which in its main features was hardly marked by his usual strength. But he quizzed Lord Salisbury on his apparent belief that Scotland was turning Conservative, and asked for the evidence,—which, as we agree with Lord Rose- bery, is at present conspicuous only "by its absence." He then went on to reply to Lord Derby's recent speech at Liver- pool; but the reply was so utterly wanting in all the elements of a reply, that many of Lord Rosebery's hearers and readers must have been tempted to question its seriousness. On that subject, however, we have said enough in another column.
Then Lord Rosebery went into the commonplaces of party controversy, the attack on the Government for holding Suakin, for pushing through the Commission on Parnellism and Crime, for wasting time on the Irish Parliamentary Under- Secretary's salary, and for renewing the Ashbourne Land- Purchase Act. This last he declares to be much more socialistic than Mr. Gladstone's proposed enfranchisement of leaseholds in the Limehouse speech. Lord Rosebery's was a singularly poor speech. The party hits were hackneyed, and the political argument for Irish Home-rule was of a kind which Lord Rosebery must have been anxious to forget as soon as it was uttered. If it just escaped sounding silly, it did not escape being so.
