Lord Randolph Churchill retaliated on Mr. Bright on Thurs- day,
in a speech to his constituents at Kidlington of almost rabid virulence. It was not, perhaps, ranch for Lord Randolph Churchill, who either knows nothing of the Free-trade move- ment, or deliberately conceals what he does know, to accuse Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright of being "two plundering cuckoos, who deliberately ejected Mr. Charles Villiers from the nest which he had constructed, and who reared there their own chattering and silly brood," or to maintain that every prophecy which Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright had made, every blessing which they had promised, every hope they had excited, had been falsified by the event, for that only shows Lord Randolph's real or simulated ignorance. But even for him it is a novelty to say of Mr. Bright, "The robe of righteousness with which he and his confederates have clothed their squalid and corrupted forms, shall be torn asunder. Naked and ashamed, shall they be beheld by all the intelligent public." At any rate, Lord Randolph attributes to Mr. Bright and his friends a shame of moral squalor of which he himself is incapable. He glories in it.
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