It is often instructive to turn from speeches delivered at
regular party meetings to speeches delivered by candidates to provincial constituencies, if we wish to see in what direction the real feeling of the electors is tending. At a Leicester meeting held on Wednesday week, to hear the new Liberal candidate for South Leicestershire, Mr. James Ellis, explain his views to the constituency, that thoroughgoing Radical, who will be Mr. T. T. Paget's colleague at the next general election, said :—" We have had Egypt on the brain—Egypt in London, Egypt in the morning papers, Egypt everywhere. But I can tell the people in London, if they would only hear what we say, this fuss about events in Egypt does not extend in anything like the same degree to the country. We care less about Egypt than they think for. (Applause.) We do not wish the Govern.. ment to be pushed or driven by bondholders. (Cheers.) We do not want the House of Commons to spend night after night bothering the Ministry about a thing merely to draw atten- tion from home affairs. They really in this way do an enormous injury to the management of affairs in Egypt itself." And again :—" There is one point which I believe is not generally understood, and that is the question of where the money that is spent does the most good. I see in the papers to-day that, I think, 12,000 camels are to be bought in Upper Egypt. I would very much rather that the money required for that should be spent on some good purpose here." Now, we do not say that opinions of that kind are not, in many cases, due to a certain narrowness in the sympathies of a great democracy. Often, we believe, it is so. But whether we deprecate or approve that limitation of sympathy, we may be sure that it is very characteristic of the new democracy ; that it has to be reckoned with ; and that it will be fatal to the success of the Jingoism with which the Tory Democrats so often season their Toryism.
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