Lord Salisbury's speech at Edinburgh on Thursday was as full
of small, cleverish hits as it was of unstatesmanlike blunders. He ascribed the failure of the effort to decide the Egyptian question without resort to arms, to the unhappy pledges given by Mr. Gladstone in the county of the Scotch capital. Lord Salisbury said that his own Government never would have ventured on the solution of the Montenegro and Greek ques- tion, in any sense displeasing to the Sultan of Turkey. They wanted to keep him in good-humour, and for the proper settlement of tho Egyptian question it was essen- tial to keep him in good-humour. Again, the failure to settle the matter without a ,war was, in part, due to our reckless squandering of military credit at Majuba Hill; and he charged the Government with having proved that " if you suffer your military credit to be obscured, the fault must be wiped out in blood." He was very sharp on the Quaker Member of the Cabinet who was guilty of sanctioning the bombardment, of a great commercial city,—an event which . Lord Salisbury spoke of as solitary in the history of this hemi- sphere. As we have elsewhere shown, it would be almost truer to say that there are but few great commercial cities which have not been bombarded ; and, as a matter of fact, neither was. Alexandria itself bombarded, nor was Mr. Bright, who resigned office because his advice was not followed, responsible for the bombardment of the forts. On the socialistic remedies for Ire- land, Lord Salisbury dilated at great length, and charged the- Government with stealing from the Tories the only remedy of any use,—the Crimes Prevention Act. The Government, he said, had proved that so far from "force being no remedy," their own successes were all derived from an appeal to force.. But then, even Mr. Bright never said that force was no remedy for violence ; he only said that it was no remedy for the disposi- tion to commit violence. And the Government have shown, both in Ireland and in Egypt, that force is no substantial remedy, except for the improper use of force.
Previous page
