After Mr. Lefevre, Lord Selborne made a very gentle Liberal-Conservative
speech ; Mr. Walter a very safe one, insisting on the love of constituencies for their old Members ; and Mr. John Morley a vigorous Radical speech, of which the key was that if, as Mr. Goschen hinted, the progress of Radical measures under a democracy was "killing," it was only because it is " killingly slow." Is it, he asked, a very "killing pace " to be only on the threshold of extending house- hold suffrage to the counties, seventeen years after its conces- sion to the boroughs of England ? Mr. John Morley did not suppose "that the Liberals of Reading or Berks, any more than the Liberals of anywhere else, would reduce their party to the condition of that famous monument to the Duke of Wellington, which Mr. Shaw Lefevre was for many months at his wits' end to know what to do with. The material was excellent, the steed was colossal, the figure heroic, but the charger had no in- side,"—with which sarcasm on the stand-still Liberals Mr. John Morley sat down amidst great applause.
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