At Glasgow the following day (Wednesday) Lord Hartington devoted himself
more to the subject of the County Franchise, and delivered a rather neat refutation of Mr. Lowe. Our various Acts for extending the franchise were not, he said, in his opinion, jumps down a series of precipices, as Mr. Lowe described them, but rather quiet steps down moderately low stairs ; and the question of equalising the town and the county franchises now, is not whether you will descend another stair, but whether when one foot is on one stair and the other on that below it, and every one admits that it is impossible to take back the latter foot, it will not secure a more solid footing and a firmer equilibrium, if you place the former on the same stair as the last, and so secure something like a balance for your body. That is a neater bit of metaphor than is common in Lord Hartington's speeches, and really an admirable answer to Mr. Lowe, both in substance and in form. As Mr. Gladstone said the other day in the Nineteena Century, English public feeling does not take offence at inequalities at all ;- but at arbitrary and unmeaning distinctions between people of the same qualities and qualifications it does take extreme offence.
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