Lord Granville on Tuesday addressed the purged Eighty Club, the
Eighty Club which has got rid of its Unionists and supplied their places with Home-rulers. He was, as usual, amusing. Referring to Lord Selborne's sarcasm on the alacrity with which Liberal Peers who had been Unionists find excuses for changing their creed, Lord Granville remarked that he was very much obliged to Lord Selborne for comparing them to fall-bodied angels, whether seated on a needle or no; and that he should be very sorry to compare the Dissentient Liberals to fallen angels; but he might be allowed to say that they belonged "to a charming species of angel, beautifully depicted by Murillo, —namely, the Cherubim whose only deficiency is having nothing particular to sit on." That is just what we should deny. It may be that the Unionist Liberals have a compara- tively small basis in the constituencies, if you limit that basis to the Liberal Party ; but as they have the whole basis of the country's reasonable Conservatism to rest on,—precisely the same basis, for example, on which the great majority of the Liberals who hold by the Monarchy, still rest,—we think they are in leas danger of a fall than their Home-rule brethren. Since when has it been a discredit to trust for support on any point to a party with which you have always agreed on that point, even though on some other smaller points you may seriously differ from it ?
