Lord Rosebery was entertaining, as usual, at Manchester on Wednesday.
He went to Manchester to see the Exhibition, and he made two speeches there,—one in aid of the Melbourne Exhibition, to which he exhorted our manufacturers to send specimens of their best work, remarking that this is especially important at a time when foreign countries protect themselves against our goods almost as carefully as they do against the Hessian fly or the Colorado beetle ; and one at the Reform Club, in which he performed the operation which the author of " Alice in Wonderland" calls "chortling in his joy," over Liberal Unionist reverses. He triumphed in the principle which, he said, united the Gladstonians, and separates them from the Hartingtonians, "a principle of so vivifying a char- acter, that the party who possessed that principle even in a minority, is stronger than many majorities." That principle appears to us to be the principle of favouring disin- tegration. Its supporters boast that they will develop union by going back to the Heptarchy. If Lord Rosebery is right, a period has begun in which a careful undoing of the history of centuries is to result in its most triumphant development.
Previous page
