The Solicitor-General, in a speech at Launceston on Monday, set
forth the record of the present Government with great clearness and ability. They have added seventy-two new vessels to the Navy ; they have reduced the capital of the National Debt by 237,000,000, and saved by their conversion scheme £1,000,000 a year in interest ; and they have taken twopence off the Income-tax, twopence a pound off tea, four- pence a pound off tobacco, fourpence in the pound off House- duty on small houses, and a halfpenny a pound off currants. Meantime, all they have done in the way of extra taxation has been to put an extra tax on champagne—Sir Edward Clarke should have added, and on spirits and beer—and to increase the death-duties on estates over £10,000. Beyond this, there is, of course, the four millions given in aid of rates, urban and rural, and the gift of two millions a year to supply free schooling. The record is certainly a very remarkable one, especially when we remember that there has been at the same time great legislative activity ; but Sir Edward Clarke is over-sanguine if he thinks that the voters will feel gratitude. The Member for Plymouth declared that "he did not believe in projects for the fusion of the Liberal Unionists and the Conservatives," and wound up his speech by pointing out that "one of the reasons for certain electoral disasters which had happened to representatives of the Unionist cause during the last year or two was this,—the people were beginning to think that there was no real danger of Home-rule being brought forward." In this view we heartily concur. The country is more anti-Home-rule than anti-Gladstonian, and the more Home-rule recedes into the background, the better become the chances of the Opposition.
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