It will be very curious to see, to begin with,
whether any of Mr. Brodrick's colleagues resent this speech. It may be remembered that one of them—the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer—said at Birmingham at the beginning of the Fiscal controversy that he adopted his father's programme in every particular, and that others, like Mr. Alfred Lyttelton and Lord Lansdowne, act under Mr. Chamberlain in the organisa- tions which, though they bear the Liberal Unionist label, are in reality part of the machinery of Tariff Reform. But even if they are mute, will not Mr. Chamberlain himself think it necessary to defend the Birmingham policy, and show that the Sheffield policy is Birmingham-and-water ? Certainly the old Mr. Chamberlain would never have allowed such things to be said without a retort, and a pretty severe one. Unless, how- ever, we are greatly mistaken, Mr. Chamberlain will now" pass quietly by without answer," ready to endure anything rather than run the risk of a public denial of his pathetic attempts to show that Chamberlainism and Balfourism are in reality identical. In the same way, we expect that Mr. Brodrick's Chamberlainite colleagues will suffer and be weak in silence. Our belief that this is how things will go is strengthened by the significant fact that neither the Times, the Daily Mail, the Standard, the Daily Telegraph, nor any other of the Chamberlainite organs deals with Mr. Brodrick's defiance of Mr. Chamberlain in its leading articles.
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