Mr. Auberon Herbert may take rank with the best phrase-
makers of the day. His letter to Monday's Times, headed " Some More Political Generosity," contains some of the best (and worst-applied) rhetoric we have read for a long time. It is a denunciation of the promoters of the Tenants' Compensa- tion Bill, and a prophecy that the dam erected by those who have promoted this Bill will soon be swept away by the rush of the agricultural labourers' interests, which will find the interests of the tenant-farmers blocking their way. Mr. Auberon Herbert, though strongly opposed to all revolutions, little or big, prefers "a revolution in fustian to a revolution in broadcloth," and con- cludes his attack on the politicians who have taken up the case of the tenant-farmers with this artistically composed bit of highly inapplicable invective :—" Let me end by congratulating the politicians of both sides on the part so successfully played as concerns this measure. For courage in asserting one's own interests, for a want of courage in defending the foundations of a healthy public life, for recklessness in party fighting, for blindness in misunderstanding the forces of the situation, the politician, whether agitating or administrating, has on this occasion fairly surpassed himself. If we can profitably wish him nothing else, we can always wish him the enjoyment of a short memory, a defective vision, a light heart, and a long life." Nothing could be happier, if only the facts were but in any decent correspondence with the language in which they are described. But we should have said that there has hardly been an agitation of our day to which this language is more comically inapplicable. Mr. Auberon Herbert is a Draconian judge of
imaginary political crimes. He sums up with scathing indignation against criminals whose careers exist only in his own fancy, and pierces with lofty scorn the immoralities of his own ingenious invention.
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