Mr. Grant Duff made on Thursday a long and able
speech to his constituents at Elgin, one main point of which was this. The Liberal party had a definite foreign policy—andit was Palmer- ston's—to support everywhere the cause of freedom and con- stitutional government. They had pursued this policy steadily for more than two generations, and with success. Their defect has been, not to be careless of being right, but to be careless of seeming right, and it has been a great ono. The leading Ministers should have taken oppor- tunities to show they were not engrossed in home affairs, as they certainly were not. They were interested in European affairs, though they did not forget that Europe was a very small place, as compared with the British Empire, and probably with a smaller future. Their blunder, however, was loss than that of their opponents, whose motto is "to seem, not to be." Mr. Grant Duff concluded a speech full of fire, by declaring that her Majesty's present advisers "had lowered the pulse of the nation, hoodwinked Parliament, vulgarised politics, allowed the House of Commons to get out of gear as a legis- lative machine, permitted terrible arrears of legislation to accumulate, and governed the Empire abominably,—more especially as regarded the army, finance, and foreign colonial affairs." All Scotchmen, except a minute minority of land- owners, endorse that scathing sentence.
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