Mr. Shaw Lefevre made a good speech to his constituents
at Reading on Wednesday last, pointing out the excessive feebleness of Lord Derby's foreign policy, and especially the quite recent weakness of allowing Turkey to substitute the five months' armistice, for the six weeks' armistice with the concession of autonomies demanded from her. He said that a witty Tory Peer bad represented his ideal of a foreign Minister at the present crisis as a cross between Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone. But what we had had was a cross between Lord Derby and Lord Beaconsfield,—" the one cold, phlegmatic, without any genuine sympathy for anything, always ready with his wet blanket to extinguish any enthusiasm, and always ready with objections to any course,—just the man to fall into the hands of a rash colleague ; the other ambitious and flashy, craving for a spirited policy, believing that his mission is to check Russia, and with a sympathy for the Turks which seemed to be common to his race :— One of these men is genius to the other.
Which is the natural man and which the genius ? Who deciphers thorn?'" The result of the cross had been most unfortunate. Every im- portant act had been represented in a double light,—the light
in which it was viewed by Lord Derby and the light in which it was viewed by Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr. Lefevre might have added, that these" crossing lights too fiercely beat upon our faint- ing minds." Yet, no doubt, Lord Beaconsfield thinks this cross between Lord Derby and Lord Beaconfield as perfect a thing in
its way as his other great conception,—in the region, not of foreign politics, but of pastoral policy,—the "crossing of Downs with Cotswolds."
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