We need not record the rumours, of which throughout the
week the air has been full, about negotiations between Lord Rose- bery and Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman. Sometimes they are described as letters, again as messages, and occasionally as confidential conversations ; but they have all the same mean- ing,—that Sir Henry asked Lord Rosebery to join him, and that Lord Rosebery preferred to row his own boat alone, They may all be true or all false, but none of them signify at all in face of the broad fact that Lord Rosebery and Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman cannot sit in the same Cabinet. The one is an Imperialist, the other is not, and the only possible result of their working together would be that both would be distrusted. It must be because he saw that that Lord Rosebery at Chesterfield appealed so pointedly from the "machine" to the body of the people. Sir Henry would not take a sinecure post, and in an active one the difference not only of convictions but of inherent instincts is too radical to be passed over.
