Lord Randolph Churchill's Government, as everybody now calls it, is
discrediting itself more rapidly than any Government of recent times. Indeed, as Mr. Labouchere observed in the course of the debate on the Medical Relief Bill, no Government that had only been about a fortnight in existence ever succeeded so well in thoroughly disgusting so large a number of its own supporters. The truth is that Lord Randolph has not Mr. Disraeli's tact in 'educating' his party. He does not educate, he humiliates it. Mr. Disraeli, indifferent as he was at heart to moral considerations, had a very keen, perhaps a somewhat humorous, sense of the decencies of political appearance. He let down his friends gently into doing what they disapproved, beginning with proposing what they approved, and making the eventual dereliction of duty appear to be a painful but inevitable necessity. Lord. Randolph does not shade off his education of his friends for the surrender of their principles in this artful way. He makes them strip themselves of their principles as a cruel schoolmaster makes a boy prepare for a flogging, in the sight of day. The consequence, of course, is a flagrant loss of self-respect and a hang-dog species of insolent defiance.
