At Taunton, on Tuesday, Lord Salisbury made an attack on
the Government, on the general character of which we have commented sufficiently elsewhere. It was irritable and shifty, but without his usual strength, its general tone displaying clearly his annoyance that such of the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin as favour the Greeks and Montenegrins should be fulfilled at all, and his wish to see them remaining a dead- letter. He described Mr. Gladatone's sympathy for the Monte- negrins and Greeks as leading England into a wild-goose chase "after a half-romantic, half-literary fanaticism ;" was very severe on the Naval Demonstration, comparing it to the painted paste-hoard batteries which the. Chinese opposed to us at Canton ; and quizzed the Government on their liberal display of " Chinese " energy. He described the state of things in the West of Ireland as one of which even the Sultan would be ashamed,—which is true, if he means that the Sultan would be greatly ashamed of not having butchered such a restive popu.. lation as the Irish without mercy ; but not true, of course, in any other sense. Lord Salisbury pledged the House of Lords to welcome coercion in Ireland, and to reject any Bill for the reform of the land-law "tainted with confiscation ;" and no doubt he spoke truly for the great majority of Peers, on both matters. But fortunately for the State, the Lords have often left undone what they would exceedingly like to do, and have sometimes even found themselves doing most reluctantly what they would passionately desire to have left undone.
