Mr. Balfour made a very interesting speech at Salford on
Saturday to a great Unionist demonstration in the Belle Vae Gardens, in which, after noticing the obscure insinuations of Mr. Gladstone's speech to the Wesleyans at the National Liberal Club with relation to the Malta mission, and remarking that Sir George Errington's recent mission to the Vatican under Mr. Gladstone's Government certainly included a reference to the Roman Catholic Bishoprics in Malta, no less than the recent mission of Sir Lintorn Simmons, and that Mr. Gladstone would certainly not deny this, he pointed out how completely Mr. Gladstone's own Government had committed itself in 1870 to the very view of the proper mode of ceding territory,—namely, by Bill,—which he had attacked in relation to Heligoland as if it were a dangerous abandoning of a prerogative of the Crown conceived in the interests of the House of Lords. Mr. Balfour thought that Mr. Gladstone was eager to persuade the public that he had broken with all the precedents which he had set in the first fifty years of his
public life, and that since he had adopted Home-rule, he had put on the new statesman and abjured the old.
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