Lord Salisbury's speech at St. Stephen's Club on Monday was
disfigured by that air of personal acrimony which always appears to us unmanly. He sneered at Mr. Chamberlain, sneered at Mr. Gladstone, sneered most of all at the Liberal Party, and treated its unity as an artificial unity, which would only last so long as it was carefully nursed and exposed to no sort of trial. That sneer is like a boomerang, it will probably come back upon Lord Salisbury. We can imagine nothing less like unity than his own principles and those of Lord Randolph Churchill. And we can imagine no alliance quite so unnatural as the alliance between his party and Mr. Parnell's, which has just produced such potent results. If Lord Salisbury is to be as triumphant as in his speech at St. Stephen's Club he ventured to anticipate, he will soon find that the test of unity is co-opera- tion, and that the last Liberal Government could bear that test at least as well as a Tory Government attempting to rest at once on the revolutionary principle of Tory Democracy, and on the Conservative principle of abiding by the ancient ways.
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