Page:A dream of Midlothian.djvu/12

8 friends have threatened it, my wife has threatened it, my doctor has threatened it, and destiny may compel it. At any rate it is always pleasant to have a port under one's lea. What between wife and doctor, and sons and friends, I think you can quite conceive that if I returned home one day and said I had abolished the House of Lords, I might possibly meet with a very warm reception! (Loud laughter, in which the right hon. gentleman joined.) I do not read the newspapers, as you know; but I am told that one of the Opposition journals has had the bad taste to reflect on the merits of those who have received personal marks of favour at my hands. I should have supposed that then even a journalist would have esteemed such a subject sacred. It was in the cause of science that I made my friend Andrew Clark a baronet—(cheers)—it was in the cause of commercial enterprise that I gave my hospitable yachting host, Donald Currie, the same reward. (Cheers.) It was in the cause of truth, because he never swerved from that story of the impaled Bulgarian, the main stay of the atrocity agitation, that your countryman, my friend, Mr. Malcolm Coll, but indeed he has an Irish accent, was promoted to be a dignitary of the Church—(loud cheers)—and it was for devotion to the cause of the great Liberal party that my electioneering agents were rewarded with the offices of Commissary Clerk, Queen's and Lords' Remembrancer, and Sheriff-substitutes, with only some paltry £5,000 or £6,000 a year. (Cheers.) Are we ashamed to let our left hand know what our right hand is doing? Is it not the great canon of our faith that everything noble, generous, and admirable, is represented by the party I have now the honour of addressing, and everything mean, contemptible, and miserable by the party that I am told will be addressed by Lord Salisbury next week? (Loud cheers.) Four years ago I told you that the

DECLINING TRADE of the country was the result of the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield. I could not have foreseen that the deadly effects of that policy could last so long. The fatal effects indeed are so strong we cannot get rid of them. We have reversed that policy from its foundations, but its ruinous results are still evident. After every trade in the country has more or less suffered, we have now reports of the depression of the great shipping interest also. You are not shipowners, I believe—(loud cheers)—and, therefore, I may tell you exactly what I feel on the subject. When I remember the thorn the shipowners had been in the sides of my friends, Messrs. Chamberlain and Childers, when I think of their unreasonable behaviour in the matter of the Suez Canal Treaty and the Merchant Shipping Bill, and, indeed, of the Congo Treaty also, I confess I have small sympathy for them. (Loud cheers.) I am sure you will agree with me that it is better for the great cause of humanity and cosmopolitanism that every ship in England and in Scotland should be laid up than that they should continue to trade under the inhuman system that Mr. Chamberlain has so bravely exposed. (Loud and prolonged cheering.) Ladies and gentlemen, I feel I have kept you too long. (No.) Nothing