Lord Salisbury made one of his acrid speeches to the
South- wark Conservative Association on Wednesday, at the Town Hall, Bermondsey, occupying the greater part of his speech with one- of those violently partisan reviews of public affairs which ne human being not prepossessed by the most bitter political animosity could accept as even pretending to historical accuracy.. Towards the close he became a little more rational, and attacked the Government for trying to deal not directly with the evils which were admitted on all sides, but indirectly with these evils, by altering the political machinery by which, in the- view of Liberals, these evils are fostered, and even in the view of Conservatives not abated. For instances, he gave the overcrowd- ing in London, which the Liberals propose to reach through a change in the government of London ; and the unequal pressure- of rates on property, which the Liberals propose to cure by creating new rating authorities in the counties. Surely it is a very reasonable, not a very unreasonable view, that in a place like London, where an unlimited number of different authorities can pull up a street separately,—and where they actually use that anthority,—each for their own isolated: purposes, to hold that unless you centralise these authorities,. you can never deal adequately with local evils. And the same is true of county rating. Finally, Lord Salisbury did- his best to depreciate the importance of the Tenants' Com- pensation Bill.
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