Lord Randolph Churchill has been paying his aadresses to Birmingham
during the present week, and on Tuesday addressed a great meeting in the Town Hall, in which he paid Birmingham the odd compliment of remarking that he was on a platform "consecrated to the memories of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden," —did Mr. Cobden ever occupy that platform, we wonder ?— " on a platform from which have been poured forth with licen- tious exuberance all the fictitious facts and fabricated doctrine of the strictest sect of the Radical Pharisee." Lord Randolph objected to Birmingham being regarded as "the pocket borough of the Radical party." He came to rescue it from the disgrace of that imputation, and yet to do credit to the old philosophical Radicals—who, having disappeared from the scene, do not stand in his way—though to do battle with the actual Radicals of the day. He promised, with consummate impudence, to obliterate from his mind. "the fact that Mr. Disraeli, in the teeth of Mr. Bright's fiercest opposition, extended the franchise to every urban householder,"—the fact, of course, being that Mr. Bright wished to extend it to every urban householder, though he thought it more prudent to do it at two steps than at one; and that Mr. Disraeli, after declaring that a much smaller pro- posal would turn a first-rate empire into a third-rate republic, connected the proposal, when he did make it, with intoler- able conditions and precautions which Mr. Gladstone, aided by Mr. Bright, swept clean away. Lord Randolph went on to prove that the Radical party was all humbug, and this he laboured to demonstrate by showing that they had deserted their platform of "peace, retrenchment, and reform."
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