Lord Derby was entertained on Wednesday by the Liverpool Reform
Club, and made an impressive speech of his own pecu- liar kind, in which he disclaimed any great change in his own per- sonal convictions, declaring that though so long a Conservative, he had never been a Tory, least of all a Jingo,—a sort of Tory who appeared to believe that no State could ever be in a perfectly healthy condition that was not occasionally occupied in pitching into its neighbours. As his political experience had grown, he had come, he said, to appreciate more and more highly "the moderation, the fairness, and the general justice with which masses of men, including all conditions of life, are disposed to use their power." After the Reform Act of 1867, he had ex- pected a certain outburst of class feeling, like the bitterness of the Continent ; but no such outburst came, and he himself believed that in England the rich might always keep their
influence in the State, if they would but put themselves at the head of movements leading up to necessary reforms. Lord Derby was for a reform of the procedure of the House- of Commons, and for a cloture, but not for a clot-tux) by a bare majority. Indeed, he suggested a vote of three-fourths, or even a vote of three-fourths of the whole House, as fair conditions of closing a debate,—conditions which would, in our opinion, make the right of closure nearly useless. On the Irish question he was in favour of steadily maintaining the Union, and he believed that a more groundless charge was never made than the charge against the present Government that it had been slack in its efforts to preserve and restore order. The Irish landlords were in the position of men whom a lifeboat had saved from a vessel going to pieces on the rocks, and such men were hardly in a position to make too much of the loss of property they had. suffered in the process. Lord Derby's cold, white light, in such a crisis as the present, is always singularly penetrating.
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