Canon MacColl wrote a valuable letter, published in last Saturday's
Times, on the supposed necessity of a sensational policy in order to secure a majority at the General Election. He pointed out that no such policy led to the considerable Liberal victory of 1865, and that there was a policy which many might have thought very exciting,—the proposed com- plete repeal of the income-tax,—before the great Liberal defeat of 1874. And he might have added that the policy of the Conservative Party at the same date, instead of being sensa- tional, amounted simply to this, that harassed interests should be let alone. Yet that was the policy which obtained a Tory majority in 1874. On the special subject of the sensational policy suggested to the Times by Mr. R. B. Brett,—the policy of Disestablishment,—he points out how strongly Mr. Bright and even Mr. Edward Miall discriminated the case of the Estab- lishment in England from the case of the Establishment in Ireland, and how little reason there is for supposing that even Nonconformists as hearty as Mr. Bright would approve so premature a decision to disestablish and dis. endow, as an adoption of this policy for the leading Liberal article of faith in the General Election of November, 1885. Our own profound belief is that if the Liberals are to win all along the line, not only must that policy not be put forward, but it must be understood as deliberately excluded by the leaders from the proposals to be submitted to the next Parliament.
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