• The Postmaster-General, Lord John Manners, made a speech at
Edinburgh on Tuesday night, in answer to an address of con- fidence,—a speech from which it would appear that Ire is the most persistent supporter of Lord Beaconsfield to be found in Lord Beakonsfield's Cabinet. He followed his chief in denouncing the Servian declaration of war as "cruel. ee-sulatErn and unjustifi- unn auto in his panegyric on the Circassian inhabitants of Turkey. He spoke of Mr. Gladstone's encourage- ment to Russia as a "malignant enterprise," in which he was supported by "only one Conservative of any eminence." Ile praised the working-men for not following Mr. Gladstone,—in which he was probably hoping against hope that they would not follow him. And he excused the Circassians for any little atro- cities they might have committed in Bulgaria, on the ground that they were the victims of Russian atrocities, after the Crimean war in Circassia itself, and were then deserted by England, after having been encouraged by England to resist Russia. But the curious thing was that after Lord John Manners had, to his own satisfaction, proved that Turkey was implicitly in the right, and Servia, Montenegro, and Russia in the wrong, he wound up most illogically by taking great credit to the
Government for being still willing to recommend that the status gee in Servia and Montenegro should be restored. The speech of Lord John Manners resembled that of a master who, after proving that he was morally bound to whip A and give a prize to B, should conclude by announcing, with an air of meritorious self- renunciation, that he was going to let A off, and after mulcting B of his pocket-money, to set him a heavy task. But Lord John Manners has never been very strong in his moral or political logic.
