At Leeds, on Tuesday, Mr. John Morley made an excellent
speech to the Liberal Six Hundred at the Philosophical Hall, on the present condition of the Reform question. He was quite unable, he said, to see the Liberal humiliation of which be beard both Tories and Liberals talking. On the contrary, he considered that the Leeds Conference, which met in the autumn of 1883, was now far nearer to carrying its whole programme than it had ever been in the interval. The so-called ' humiliation ' of the Liberals was about to result in the fullest possible fulfilment of the most sanguine Liberal anticipations. All that the Govern- ment had done was to act upon the suggestion made by Lord Hartington, and concurred in by Sir Charles Dike and Mr. Chamberlain in the Recess ; all that the Conservatives had done was to recede absolutely from what they had asserted in criticising that suggestion. Lord Salisbury had declined to have anything to say to the Redistribution Bill till it had passed the House of Commons and gone up to the Lords. Lord John Manners and Mr. Lowther had repudiated the notion of co-operating in drafting a Bill which would give some promise of permanence. What was now going on was a complete reversal of all the Tories had insisted on, while the Liberal Government was not making a single concession. [The Standard's claim that the promise to make the Redistribution Bill a Government question is such a concession, is absurd on the very face of it. The promise was only to make it so in the House of Commons ; and who ever eail of any Government calmly accepting defeat on such a
.11 s that in the House of Commons ?] As for the ultimate qua. el with the Lords, the Commons must be enormously stren hened by the proposed reform ; and one of two things must 12.ippen. Either the Lords would assume quietly the
attitude of a merely consultative Second Chamber, which could not pretend to overrule the deliberate will of the Representative Chamber ; or, if they did not, they would soon after the passing of the Reform Bill have a renewal of the struggle of this year under circumstances which must ensure an easy victory to the Commons. That we call the common-sense of the question, from a genuinely Radical point of view.
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