[To THE EDITOR OP TER 'SPECTATOR']
Sin,—The Prime Minister has assured us that he never reads the newspapers. Has he ever condescended to glance
at his uncle's essays in the Quarterly Review ? And, if so, has he realised the application of the following passage from the first article on Stanhope's Life of Pitt P-
" There is no blindness so unaccountable as the blindness of English statesmen to the political value of a character. Living only in and for the House of Commons, moving in an atmosphere of constant intrigue, accustomed to look upon oratory as a mode of angling for political support and upon political professions as only baits of more or less attractiveness, they acquire a very peculiar code of ethics, and they are liable wholly to lose sight of the fact that there is a stiffer and less corrupted morality out of doors. They not only come to forget what is right, but they forget that there is any one who knows it. The educated thought of England, before the bar of whose opinion all political conduct must appear, measures the manceuvres of politicians by no more lenient code than that which it applies to the affairs of private life. Ordinary men cannot easily bring themselves to pass over, as judicious tactics in a statesman, the conduct which in their next-door neighbours they would condemn as impudent insin- cerity. On the other hand, the politician cannot bring himself to believe that the party strategy and personal competition which are everything to his mind are trifles too slight to think about in the eyes of the nation he serves. He goes on with his game of chess, in which mighty principles and deep-seated sentiments are the pawns to be sacrificed or exchanged as the moment's convenience may suggest, in the simple faith that this is the real business which he has been sent to Parliament to transact. And thus we have had the spectacle, even in later days, of party leaders of considerable intellect laboriously and carefully ruining themselves in the esteem of the nation, and heaping blunder upon blunder, from which the meanest of their followers would have been competent to warn them. They have failed because they have been blind to the elementary truth that a character for unselfish honesty is the only secure passport to the confidence of the English people. Its place can never be supplied by fine speeches or dexterous rnanceuvres."
—I am, Sir, &c., J. L.
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