Lord Randolph Churchill's speech contained one or two Disraeli-ish phrases,
such as this,—" The careering conferences of Mr. Morley and the childish screams of Mr. Jesse Collings ;" but the following was the best of these phrases,—" We know," he said, "that Tory disunion is a phantom and a fiction, the ridiculous creation of a disordered and dissipated Radical imagination," where the word " dissipated" is after Mr. Disraeli's own heart ; but it contained little but Tory-Democratic chaff. He compli- mented Lancashire on having repudiated Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hartington in 1868, and called it a marvellous foresight which Lancashire displayed. He did not refer to the change which came over Lancashire opinion in 1880, for of course it would have been awkward to rally Lancashire on changing her opinion just at the very moment when, according to Lord Randolph, the marvellous foresight of 1868 was on the eve of being justified. The main idea of his speech was to declare that Mr. Gladstone had confessed every act of his administration a "total failure," which, being entirely contrary to the facts of the case, naturally seems to Lord Randolph Churchill the very per- fection of attack. He knew, he said, "the inexhaustible, the in- veterate, the innate capacity of the Liberal Party for the falsifi- cation of political truth." Innate that capacity has never been in any politician whom we can remember, to the same extent in which it appears to be innate in Lord Randolph.
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