Mr. Chamberlain made an excellent speech to his constituents at
Birmingham on Tuesday. He said you might almost track the path of Tory Governments in this country by the debts they left behind them, and that this Government certainly would be no exception to that rule. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had spoken "almost repiningly " of the cost of education in England, but for hi a (Mr. Chamberlain's) part, much as he valued educa- tion, he did grudge taking the money of English taxpayers in order to set up a free school in Cyprus for the Turkish Pashas, where Sir Garnet Wolseley might give them a course of "easy lessons in the rudiments of administration." "The policy of the Government," he says, "seems to me like the policy of the, Directors of the Glasgow Bank which has just failed, and which has brought ruin to thousands of innocent families. We are taking one false step to cover another ; we are throwing good money after bad ; we are increasing our liabilities in order to avoid loss ; we are rushing straight to a catastrophe, in order to avoid an imaginary danger." Further, Mr. Chamberlain likened the Government to the wise men of Gotham, who jumped into the river in order to avoid being wetted by the rain ; and on the whole, he managed to send away his audience with a host of graphic illus- trations in their minds of the folly of a Government which, when- ever it gets into a scrape, always seems to offer its opponent not, indeed, double or quits, but rather double without quits,—a species of gambling to which no experienced player would have anything to say.
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