Omens of a Dissolution multiply. Sir Stafford Northcote, anxious to
stimulate the enthusiasm of the Conservatives of the Tower Hamlets, attended a banquet of the Constitutional Asso- ciation of that borough at the Bow and Bromley Institute on Wednesday evening. In his speech he referred frequently to the witchery of Mr. Ritchie, the Conservative Member of the Tower Hamlets, " to whose seductive tongue " it was, he said, due, that he was present among them that evening. Clearly Mr. Ritchie is not very easy about his seat, and is well aware that the personal support of the leader of the House of Com- mons is a great point in his favour. There was nothing new in the speech, except the mild audacity of the declaration that " Conservatives have learnt many lessons of late, and this lesson above all,—that they are not to preserve the Constitution of this country by distrusting the people, but by trusting them," to which the Standard very acutely adds the rider—that not only must the Conservatives trust the people, but the people must trust the Conservatives. This rider is assuredly much the more essential for Conservative purposes of the two conditions, but also considerably the more difficult, unless at least the people's trust in the Conservatives is to vary inversely with the evidence of Conservative trust in them.
