Mr. Henderson issued a kind of denial of the authenticity
of this message, but it was not seriously repudiated by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald himself till it had done its work. His repudiation was then too vehement to be, in our judgment, very impressive. He accused Sir Maurice Levy of having acted on the strength of mere "tittle-tattle " and not through any direct authorization from the Labour Party. All this has been called a " mystery," but we cannot profess to see anything very mysterious about it. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald had time enough widely to repudiate the message in Leicester before the polling. That he did not do so surely suggests that he wished the Liberal candidate to win—the Parliamentary Labour Party is at present, as we have often said, simply an appanage of the Liberal Party—but did not care to say so plainly to the working men of Leicester who dislike the Government and most of its acts. If this episode is indica- tion of the state of the Labour Party we are not surprised at the revolt at Leicester, and we expect to see others like it.
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