Sir William Harcourt had nothing much to say to his
con- stituents at Derby on Wednesday, and though he is generally
a man to make nothing look like much, he only succeeded on this occasion in making it look a prodigiously big nought. A great deal was made of the wickedness of the House of Lords ; and when, after a Session like the present, an Opposition orator makes a great deal of the wickedness of the House of Lords, every one sees that he wants to draw attention away from the sins of the House of Commons. Sir William Harcourt was obliging enough to approve Lord Salisbury's foreign policy, to tell him that there was nothing of the Jingo about him as yet, and that so long as he was modest and un-Jingoish, he should have Sir William Harcourt's powerful support. Even the Tithe Bill and the Irish Land-Purchase Bill he passed over hurriedly, doing as much as he could to with- draw attention from that speech of Mr. Parnell's in which Mr. Parnell indicated that he might not be able to oppose the latter Bill ; and on the subject of the next Session, he tried to be as confident as possible that it would be all failure, and that with the General Election would come the final and complete collapse of a miserable Government. Does Sir William Har- court believe all that ? We do not know. " Belief " is a word. which has lost its significance for Sir William Harcourt.
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