Lord George Hamilton, formerly Under-Secretary of State for India, delivered
a lecture in the Music-hall, Edinburgh, on Wednesday, to the members of the Edinburgh Conservative Association. Lord George had estimated the number of words in the longer Scotch speeches of Mr. Gladstone, and believed them to be 85,840. He had read all those words attentively, and held that in a man of Mr. Gladstone's position, verbosity became " a positive danger to the Common- wealth." His remedy for this infinite " verbosity " of a great man was, however, the comparatively infinitesimal verbosity of a small man. Lord George's words were, indeed, not numerous enough to contain even a fair suggestion of most of the facts which he professed to discuss ; they were words which passed over those facts, like the shadows which cause the partial " obscura- tion " of a bright disk. Take these, for instance,—" Shere Ali, alarmed at the progress of Russia, expressed a natural wish in 1873 for an assurance of British protection. His advances were so coldly repelled by the Duke of Argyll, then Secretary of State for India, that from the date of the Duke's refusal to entertain his proposals, he commenced to intrigue with Russia against us." Lord George, no doubt, thinks this a true statement of the facts. He might almost as well have accepted the statement of the Claimant's counsel as a true statement of the facts of the Tichborne case. Lord George is " invincibly ignorant" on many subjects, and on none more than on contested questions of Indian policy.
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