The Tower Hamlets Radical Association having addressed to Mr. Gladstone
a letter of thanks for his Birmingham speech, and requested him to assume the lead of the Radical party, Mr. Gladstone has replied in a letter virtually disclaiming any wish to call himself distinctively a Radical, though quite admitting the legitimacy and utility of a Radical section of the Liberal party, and still more emphatically disclaiming any intention of leading any party or section of a party, either now or at any future time. Mr. Gladstone looks, he says, with Mr. J. S. Mill, on the Liberals as a great political " Church ;" and though he has no morbid fear of any of its sections, his own wish is "to urge its union and promote its interests as a whole." Yet judging rather by the meaning of the word ' radical' than by its present, or indeed any one of its past meanings, we should have called Mr. Gladstone more distinctively Radical in temperament,—more in- clined, that is, when he sees an evil, to dig straight at its root,— than Liberal, which means, we suppose, inclined both in the abstract and in the concrete, to look for progress and to ex- tend freedom. There are men who might be termed with some propriety Conservative-Radicals, and of these perhaps the greatest is Mr. Gladstone.
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