NEWS OF THE WEEK.
MR. DISRAELI made one of his most unblushing speeches at the Merchant Taylors' dinner on Wednesday. Indeed, the Merchant Taylors' dinner generally seems to make him shameless, or rather, perhaps, ostentatious of that of which other statesmen would be ashamed. He screwed up the Exeter Hall pietism of manner a peg higher than he has yet been able to manage, and got as far as "recognizing the hand of Providence in this awful dispensation" —to wit, that the new constituencies "will be called upon as their first duty to decide whether they will sustain or whether they will subvert the Constitution of their country." Mr. Disraeli, as usual, insisted on the importance of an alliance—in the abstract, —between the "principle of authority" and the "principle of religion ;" he asserted that this alliance was threatened, "one might almost say because it had accomplished" the two great results of guaranteeing religious liberty and civil rights ; and he anticipated that the fall of the Irish Establishment would give a wound to the Protestant Church in Europe generally "from which it would probably never recover." To this Mr. Disraeli added his usual panegyrics on Lord Derby and Lord Stanley, with whom he associated this time Mr. Hardy, hinting that Lord Stanley had extricated the country from difficulties in which his predecessors had involved it,—Lord Clarendon having been specially requested by the Tories to return to his place at the Foreign Office ;—and he declared that the great Conservative reform of last session would be thought by posterity to have been "a great work not meanly accomplished, "—a curious addition, if it should be so, to the number of cases in which posterity has directly reversed the deliberate opinion of con- temporary history.
