Sir Mountstuaxt Grant-Duff delivered at Banff yesterday week one of
those striking reviews of the political situation for which the former Member for the Elgin Burghs was at one time so well known. Full of knowledge and literary skill, a little dreamy in his estimate of what is possible, and very incisive in his account of what he sees, Sir Mountstuart's @Anne always set One thinking, and generally set one smiling at the pointedness of his pithy resumes. For example, going back to the mistakes of Mr. Disraeli's foreign policy in 187d, when it became necessary to subordinate all considerations to the one consideration of destroying Lord Beaconsfield's Government, he said the other night It was, however, a sad misfortune that we were obliged to do this. Almost everybody on every side thought violently, spoke violently, acted violently." We may trace a great many of our recent troubles, we believe, to that misfortune. But Sir M. E. Grant- Duff's dreaminess comes out in his Irish proposal to unite the North of Ireland for electoral purposes to Scotland, and to put the rest of the country for a long time under a non-political quasi-Indian Government. Geography cannot be ignored in that way. Ulster is really quite as unwilling to be wrenched away from the rest of Ireland, as the rest of Ireland is to be wrenched away from Ulster. But the speech is well worth reading on every account, and most admirable is the sentence which Sir Mountstuart borrows (not for the first time) from De Tocqueville for the conclusion of his melancholy retrospect, —" I will not believe in the continuance of darkness merely because I do not see the new sun which is destined to arise."
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