The Conservatives assembled a great crowd, which is estimated by
the Times as numbering 120,000 persons, and by the Pall Mail as numbering 80,000, in the grounds of Nostell Priory last Saturday, the residence of Mr. Rowland Winn, M.P., the Con- servative Whip ; but, according to the Times, by far the greater number went to enjoy the beautiful grounds, and betrayed no interest at all in the political proceedings. " Perhaps," says the Times' reporter, " from 20,000 to 30,000 men did from the beginning to the end form a patient audience during the three hours during which the outdoor proceedings lasted." Sir Stafford Northcote made his speech turn on the asserted mis- representations of the Liberal Party. According to him, Mr. Gladstone provoked spontaneously, and without the least excuse, the quarrel with the Lords by the warning he addressed to the Upper House on the third reading of the Franchise Bill ; for Sir Stafford Northcote had f never heard, we suppose, of Lord Salisbury's loudly professed intention to force an appeal to the people by rejecting the Fran- chise Bill, long before it had reached the House of Lords ; or of the statements of men like Mr. Lowther that its doom was absolutely certain, that it was as " dead as a door-nail." " We are met," said Sir Stafford, " by the cry that the Peers are against the people, and that the Peers must be swept away. Now, I maintain that that is as direct a falsehood as anybody ever spoke. I do not care who repeats that assertion. I main- tain, and you know it well, that that statement is false." Yet we positively know that the Peers are against the people, so far as the people say that even the Franchise Bill without the Redistribution Bill is vastly better than no Reform Bill and would give a truer representation of the people, and so far as the Peers, on the contrary, say Better no Bill at all than an incomplete Bill,' and so far as they take the certain means for preventing any Bill at all from passing, by preventing the pass- ing of the only instalment which would give us some security for the rest. It is not, perhaps, an altogether unexampled state of things that the very points on which Sir Stafford Northcote cries out loudest that the Tories and the Peers are cruelly mis- represented, are the very points on which the Liberals hold that he most grossly misrepresents the Liberal policy and action.
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