Lord Rosebery made an amusing speech to the Liverpool Reform
Club on Wednesday. He remarked that there bad been assembled in one small room lately, champions whom a month ago Salisbury plain could not have contained without serious risk of bloodshed. Even now there was great discontent " in the bucolic mind of Mr. Chaplin and in the mind of that other Lincolnshire Member, that eccentric vestal virgin, Mr. Lowther, who preserved the sacred fire of Eldonian Tory- ism." In spite of this discontent, however, Lord Rosebery thought that almost every reasonable person was satisfied. The next great question would be the House of Lords, which at present seemed to be a " filter for converting the rough and turbid waters of Liberalism into the full stream of Conservative sentiment." Lord Rosebery's own idea was to abolish the hereditary character of the House of Lords ; but does not that need as much of a revolution as any other change, however fundamental ? And would the life-Peers be any less Conservative ? What have we been hearing lately from Lord Bramwell and Lord Penzance ?
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