Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman made a successful party speech at Cambridge
this day week, which was none the better, but rather the worse, for being so successful. It was partisan through and through, except for one qualification, when he genially suggested that probably some of his opponents were not fully conscious of the base character of their own Imperialism. Coleridge once said that " dregs from the bottom half-way up, and froth from the top half-way down," made up Whitbread's "entire." This was witty, but certainly not true, but we might say with truth that "dregs from the bottom half-way up, and froth from the top half-way down," made up Sir Henry Campbell-Banuerman's rhetoric. Here is a specimen of the " dregs." After describing the reason- able Imperialism of the Gladstonians, he went on, "the word, however, covered another policy, which had not so much to idp with the Empire as with the mode of governing the _Empire, and that policy, when stripped to the skin, disclosed the main idea which, as long as the trappings of the phrases remained upon it, could not be readily disclosed,—the main idea that the control of the government of the Empire should rest with the upper classes, with society, with the rich." And here is a specimen of the froth. "For Cs own part he declared himself a House of Commons man. He regarded the House of Commons and not the Foreign Minister, nor the Prime Minister, nor the Cabinet, as being the corner-stone, the keystone, the backbone, the kernel, the sheet-anchor, or any other simile they liked, of their Constitution ; " and he "considered that it would remain the duty of the Liberal party to accept twenty years' sacrifice of power, or, if in power, half a dozen years' sacrifice of useful legislation, in order to maintain and secure not only the rights and privileges, but the efficiency, the dignity, the preponderance of the representative Imperial Chamber." Perhaps the froth is just a little less indigestible than the dregs.
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