Mr. T. C. Baring, who took the chair at a
Unionist meeting at Stratford on Wednesday evening, expressed a hope, in which we cannot see our way to concur, that when the Home-rule question is settled by the united action of the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, the old party organisatiorm would be resumed, though with a little more of mutual respect between the Conservatives and Liberals than used to prevail between them. That implies what we do not believe to be true, that the Conservatives are waiving their old Tory doctrines only or chiefly for the purposes of this alliance. But the truth is that, with the present great popular constituencies, the Tories have no choice but to waive their old privilege doctrines, if they wish to get returned to Parliament at all. So far as we can judge, the reconstruction of the Tory Party on new lines was inevitable after the Redistribution Act of 1885; and everything points to the recasting of parties on new principles,—one of them on the principle of hearty loyalty to the nation and its central institutions, the other of them on the principle of local impatience of central control, and of setting provincial liberty above even national law.
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