A collision between Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Argyll
has resulted from the Leeds meeting. The Duke had said in his speech :—" If you want to hear more of the way in which the people of this country are misled by the Government, I will mention two more statements of Lord Salisbury. First of all, he says that the Ameer refused, because if he accepted a British Embassy he would be obliged to accept a Russian Embassy. There is not a word of truth in that statement. I don't accuse Lord Salisbury of having said this, knowing it to be untrue. But I say it is entirely untrue. I say there is not a word of truth in it. That argument was heard in the debate in the Durbar by our Agent, but it was not contained in the Ameer's letter, and I maintain that it having been men- tioned in the Cabinet, and not having been inserted in the Ameer's letter, proves that it was rejected, and not adopted." If the Duke had also said that the argument was used. in the Durbar by the Ameer himself, in the presence of our Native Agent, but that on consideration it was not further pressed, and was not once advanced by the Ameer's Minister in the official con- ferences at Peshawar, he would have been quite exact. Lord Salisbury, however, in his letter to Tuesday's Times, quotes only part of what the Duke said,—leaving out, first, the Duke's disclaimer of imputing to him an intention to mislead; next, his admission that the argument referred to was used in the Durbar ; and lastly, his inference from its subsequent omission in the official correspondence,—and so represents the Duke as gratuitously imputing to him a direct falsehood, and as conceal- ing the fact that his statement was literally true. Worse still, Lord Salisbury says that the Duke did not even "hint at" "the evidence on which his [Lord Salisbury's 3 statement rested ; " whereas the Duke expressly referred to it, and ex- plained his reason for attaching no weight to it. The Duke of Argyll's language was certainly too strong. There was a word of truth, though hardly any truth of effect, in what Lord Salisbury said at Manchester. But the Duke's misrepresenta- tion of Lord Salisbury in the Leeds speech, is not to be com- pared in seriousness with Lord Salisbury's misrepresentation of the Duke in the letter to Tuesday's Times.
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