Mr. Gladstone delivered an impromptu sort of speech at a
garden party at Hampstead on Saturday afternoon, in Mr. Holiday's grounds, which would have run off much more happily had the return for the Isle of Thanet been the return he had hoped for. As it was, there was a certain check to the enthusiasm of the occasion, as it had probably sketched itself out to his imagination while he still hoped for a triumph. However, Mr. Gladstone was able to show satisfactorily enough that if at the next General Election he and his friends could reduce the hostile majority, not as much as it had been reduced since 1886 in the Isle of Thanet, but only as much as it had been reduced since 1885, they would win at the next appeal to the people, and with that satisfactory conviction he was obliged to content himself. He then went on to attack the Irish Resident Magistrates, and to apologise for the "Plan of Campaign" as the less of two evils, after the fashion of his recent speeches ; indeed, he did not scruple to say that the authors of the "Plan of Campaign "had to choose between this and leaving "the people to perish," a statement which, we believe, to be absolutely unfounded. Mr. Gladstone even exulted in Mr. Dillon's popularity in England, a popularity which, so far as it is real, seems to us very discreditable to English audiences, but which is certainly due much more to Mr. Gladstone's patronage of Mr. Dillon than to Mr. Dillon's own political achievements. Mr. Gladstone's influence is wide enough to secure popularity for a hundred Mr. Dillons, and he ought, therefore, to be a little more scrupulous in his drafts on the almost unlimited confidence of the Liberal Party.
