Mr. Balfour made a very telling speech at Leeds yesterday
week, which was wanting only in what Mr. Balfour's speeches frequently want, the sense of magnanimity. He replies to Mr. Gladstone with at least as much bitterness as Mr. Glad- stone exhibits in attacking him ; and as the younger man, and with the official facts at his disposal, he would, we think, pro- duce more effect, as well as get a hearing in places where he now excites nothing but anger, by a less contemptuous tone. For example :—" I do not know whether any of you have ever listened to a schoolgirl not highly endowed with musical gifts, laboriously practising a tune which is being taught her,—how she goes over the same weary succession of notes time after time, and how the unfortunate auditor can always tell before- hand at what point she will make the inevitable blunder, put her finger down on the wrong note, and excruciate her audience. It is the business of the patient schoolmistress never to weary of correcting the error, however often made, and however indifferent the pupil may show herself to the efforts being made to teach her. On this occasion, I propose to act the part of the patient schoolmistress." And he acted it, but it was a schoolmistress at least as tart as patient. To Mr. Glad- stone's charge that he had suppressed the fact that Lord Spencer had ordered Mr. Harrington to be exceptionally treated in prison, Mr. Balfour replied that, on Lord Spencer's own showing, he had left no record of this order, so that he (Mr. Balfour) had absolutely no means of knowing that it was so. Indeed, as Lord Spencer had given his orders over the heads of the Irish Prisons Board, instead of through their agency, and as the remission of punishment was entirely illegal, the act of leniency was an irregularity of which he should never have thought of accusing Lord Spencer.
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