Mr. Herbert Gladstone, in a speech to his constituents at
Leeds, delivered yesterday week, remarked on an element in recent Conservative speeches which to us seems quite invisible,
"an expectation of defeat,"—and said that as the feeling grew, the Conservatives were more and more vainglorious in their boasts of success. Liberals, he said, had blundered in Ireland; but the more they blundered, the more they excluded the possibility of failure and increased the chance of success. That is a very ingenuous remark. If Robert Bruce's celebrated spider, instead of going on with its unsuccessful efforts to climb to the ceiling, had insisted on trying a new method after every failure, he would certainly never have succeeded at all. Yet -this is what Mr. Herbert Gladstone would have recommended as sure to secure him a greater and greater chance of success at every new departure.
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