Lord Lansdowne was entertained by the Junior Constitu- tional Club
on Monday night at a banquet given in his honour on the completion of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. In reply- ing to the toast of the evening, Lord Lansdowne, with characteristic modesty, refused to accept the compliment as one purely personal to himself, and declared that there had been no Prime Minister who had given a closer and more unremitting attention to foreign affairs than Mr. Balfour. While admitting that the Opposition were in the main lenient critics of the foreign policy of the present Government, Lord Lansdowne repudiated the charge that they claimed a monopoly of intelligence and information in that sphere. It was not this conviction that induced the Cabinet to disregard a hostile majority last July ; it was simply that while impor- tant negotiations were in progress the Cabinet believed that a change of Government, even a temporary dislocation in the administration of external affairs, would have been in the highest degree prejudicial to the public interests of the country. After acknowledging the patriotism and sound judgment of Sir Edward Grey, and insisting on the need of a continuous foreign policy, Lord Lansdowne gave it as his opinion that the time for objecting to alliances as entanglements had passed by, and that the price of the policy of isolation was more than we could afford to pay.
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