For a party which professes itself so eager for another
general election, as an event certain to improve its own prospects and perhaps to ruin ours, the Tories are certainly showing apathy at the by-elections. That Mr. Herbert Gladstone has been re-elected for Leeds without opposition, on accepting office as a Junior Lord of the Treasury without salary, we do not wonder, both because it is not usual to inflict a contest on a young man of promise who is just beginning his official career, at a by- election, and because Leeds is a singularly unpropitious place for Tories to select, if they wished to attempt such a contest. But that Mr. Buchanan should have been permitted to walk over the course for Edinburgh, and that only on Thursday, after the Liberal candidates had been a week in the field, was a Tory candidate found for North Durham and North Lincoln- shire, does look like party despondency. The Tories did, indeed, at once decide to contest Tyrone ; but that was, in part, because the Land League offered them assistance in trying to wrest the seat from the Liberal, by starting a candidate of their own. Even now in North Durham the Tories have got a candidate (Sir George Elliot), who is appealing to the Irish vote on the cry that Mr. Forster ought at once to liberate the suspects ; and in North Lincolnshire, Mr. James Lowther, the Tory ex-Secretary for Ireland, is the pis-aller on whom they have at last fixed. The pulse of Tory hope appears just now to be quick, rather intermittent, and, as the doctors say, very " compressible,"— the pulse of a patient with a weak and rather excitable heart.
