Mr. Chamberlain made a clever speech at Birmingham on Thursday,
in which be classed the Scotsman, the Leeds Mercury, and this journal together as papers conducted " without a spark of popular sympathy." For our own parts, we should have supposed that that was as far as possible from the truth of the case ; for even where we have opposed Mr. Chamberlain's views most earnestly, it has always been from our deep.feeling that they endangered seriously the happiness of the people, and never from any want of sympathy with the people. We have a keener feeling, probably, than Mr. Chamberlain of the mis- chiefs of the old Poor Law,—the grave deterioration in popular independence and popular morality which it produced; and if reasonable evidence could be given that the Disestablishment of the Church would benefit, in the best sense, the people of England, we would join the Disestablishers at once. Mr. Chamberlain mistakes us when he thinks that we are not actuated by sympathy for the people, just as he might mistake the motives of any man who might refuse alms in the street because he was actuated by popular sympathy, and not .because be was deficient in it.
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