On Saturday last, in a very able speech at Doncaster,
-Mr. Balfour declared that it was not till Mr. Gladstone had had seven years to meditate the changes he was anxious to make in his first great attempt to give Ireland Home-rule in 1886,— not till he produced his revised Home-rule Bill in 1893,—that the country realised how hopeless and ill-conceived the whole policy was. Then, and not till then, the nation made up its mind that the policy was- fundamentally ruinous. Only recently Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, when heckled as to the proposal to retain the Irish representatives and give them an influence over British affairs, which the British people were not to be allowed to exert over Irish affairs, had replied that this was only a " temporary arrangement." "It was the least inconvenient way of dealing with a very difficult question." Very likely it was, said Mr. Balfour, but are we come to this, that we are to pull down the solid structure of the British Constitution and erect in its place a temporary shanty which even its own architects declare to be only a temporary makeshift ? The attack on the House of Lords was a redupli- cation of the same gigantic blunder. The Government did not know what to put in ita place, a,n.d proposed a great revolution as a temporary arrangement. Democracy, said Mr. Balfour, is Conservative, and can no more live by per- petual revolutions than a man can obtain a wholesome diet on perpetual blue-pills. In a third very important speech at Haddington on Tuesday, Mr. Balfour declared that though he and his party had refrained from attacking Lord Rose- bery's foreign policy, on national principles, they had not regarded it as a strong, but a feeble, foreign policy. In relation to Uganda, nothing could have been more heel.- I tating. He might have added that, in relation to West 1 Africa, nothing could have been more hasty and careless. In relation also to the French policy in Cochin-China, nothing could have been less firm and dignified. Mr. Balfour has been the great orator of the General Election of 1895.
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