The " Druids' " dinner at Oxford on New Year's
Day was, this year, not political. Mr. Hall, the Conservative Member, was absent, owing to an attack of influenza ; and Sir William Harcourt, who was present, and apparently in force, deferred opening his mind to his constituents on the great subject of the day till next week. But following the Earl of Jersey, who hoped that "though the news of the day was hardly favourable, the Government would pursue their efforts in the cause of peace," Sir William Harcourt quoted Lord Clarendon's account of the respectable Falkland,—the constitutional royalist of the great Civil War,—" he ingeminated [i.e., redoubled] the words peace, peace,' " and as we understand Sir William Harcourt, he adopted them as the sum of his own counsel for the present crisis. We earnestly hope, however, that he may not be going to confine his speech next week to a mere expansion of Falkland's ejaculations. The omen would not be particularly favourable. Falkland was one of those who by his timidity and over-dread of war, and his short-sighted desertion to the Royalist party when the King was wrong and clearly untrustworthy, really prolonged a struggle which, but for him and those like him, might have been much shorter and much less bloody. And so, too, those who wish to patch up a peace in the East of Europe before the conditions of a durable peace are gained, are but imitating Falkland, and sigh- ing after the end before they have secured the means. We have all read the somewhat stern denunciation of those who "in- geminate peace," where there is no peace.
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