NEWS OF THE WEEK.
mERCH1 ANT Taylors' Company entertained the leading mem- bers of the Government—the Prime Minister, Lord Derby, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Cross—on Wednesday, when Mr. Disraeli delivered a speech on the error of the Tory party in having so long rejected the Liberal principles of Pitt and Grenville con- cerning electoral extension, religion, and free-trade, which prin- ciples he evidently regards it as his own mission to reassert and restore to their natural influence over the party which he leads, — .a sanguine prospect, on which w- e have said something elsewhere. The moral influence of Pitt and Grenville, he said, was lost through the thought and passion of the country being "absorbed by the great Continental -war ; and when it terminated in a blaze of glory not favourable to reflection, there was no man in our ranks of sufficiently commanding mind who could divert again the intelligence of the country to that track of national improvement from which it had deviated." Sir Robert Peel evidently was not, in Mr. Disraeli's estimation, equal to the task. But Mr. Disraeli (who began his career by falling savagely on Sir Robert Peel for leading back the intelligence of the country to the path of free-trade) is equal to it, and has formally assumed it.
