The Conservative working-men at the Crystal Palace on Mon- day
were compelled to be satisfied with Lord John Manners and Mr. Mowbray, as the representatives of her Majesty's Government. Mr. Disraeli was compelled to stay away, and Lord Stanley had been sent for to Windsor. But Lord John Manners did what was wanted very nicely. He was quite poetical about the peasants, as he "preferred" to call our agricultural labourers, and only hoped some of them were enfranchised in boroughs like Thetford. He was enthusiastic about the working-men of the small boroughs, so much so that he asked all working-men to feel particularly grateful for the power which their class had obtained in such boroughs as Ashburton, &c., which the cruel Liberals wished to lop off altogether. He descanted on the determination of the Con- servatives to surrender no Conservative principle. The Crown, the House of Lords, the Church, everything the Conservatives love, is to be stronger instead of weaker for the change. The new voters are, said Lord John Manners, a very well educated class for the purpose, and he was quite sure that "This England of ours, this nursing mother of nations, of Churches, secure in her island home, strong in the traditions, laws, customs, and institutions of centuries, would, not in spite, but in consequence of the Reform Act of 1867, yet hand down to a grateful posterity the inestimable blessings of her pure religion and her ordered free- dom." Nothing could have been nicer. Lord Stanley would not have been nearly so nice.
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