Colonel Mure, M.P. for Renfrewshire, addressed his consti- tuents near
Glasgow on Monday night, in an elaborate speech, in which he tried to show that if the Liberals had been in power they would have plunged us into war on behalf of Turkey, and that though the Government had made a poor and patch-work affair of the Treaty of Berlin, they could hardly have done better under the circumstances,—circumstances which did not admit of any arrange- ment of a durable kind. In short, Colonel Mure's estimate of the doings of the Government was pretty nearly this,—that they were, perhaps, the best that we could have reasonably expected, but that bad was the best. "The time was not arrived, neither were the men born, who would permanently settle the Eastern Ques- tion." Possibly not ; but the time had arrived when the obstacles to that settlement which the Government anxiously accumulated, might have been removed. And in spite of Colonel Mure's apology,—the apology of a Liberal Jingo,—we venture to think that the Government has shown more energy in en- dangering everything, than it was at all willing to show in smoothing the way to the natural conclusion. It is a Govern- ment with a special genius for building dams which are certain to produce, and break down under, the consequent floods.
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