At a meeting of the Bromley Liberal Association, last week,
Mr. Sydney Buxton took the very sensible line of congratulating the country on the amount of public speaking during the Recess, which would, he said, help political knowledge to filter down to the great . constituencies by whom we are really governed ; and at the same time, he warned the Association of the dangers attendant on a wrongly-focussed photograph of such a country as Ireland. Were we, he said, to have daily presented to us a similar picture of England, with all the light thrown on the diseased parts, and none of it on the healthy elements of the community, the effect would be sufficiently ghastly and startling. It is the good effect of constant descrip- tion and discussion, that such things as we know gradually reach all classes of voters; it is the evil effect of it that such things as are startling to us occupy our attention, to the exclusion of all other things, and so convey a false total impression. Certainly, Mr. Sydney Buxton is right. The popular education in political facts is wholly good ; the concentration of attention on morbid conditions, as if they were the whole, is dangerous, and tends to- public hysteria,—from which, indeed, in regard to Ireland, the public is really suffering.
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