What was the great motto which expressed all their principles, which enabled the Radical party of old days to guide and control the course of events, to make and unmake Ministers and Governments, to win and retain the confidence of mighty cities such as yours? ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform!’--in other words, Non-intervention, Rigid Economy, and genuine Progressive Legislation. And so long as they adhered to those great rocks with the tenacity of limpets, so long was their good name secure--so long was their wisdom undoubted; and year by year they could appear before you with clean hands and clear consciences to ask from you a renewal of your confidence. Chancellors of the Exchequer, Secretaries to the Treasury and of public departments, groaned under the tyrannical economy of Mr. Hume, but were uncommonly careful to give him as little handle as possible for what they arrogantly called his cheese-paring mania. The genius and influence of Mr. Cobden exercised a diminishing effect upon the estimates of the War and Navy Ministers; and Mr. Bright and Mr. Milner Gibson either averted or effectually censured unjust and unnecessary war. The Radical party of those days, he went on, was few in number, with no representatives in the Government and no Caucus in the country. ‘It was their great principles,’ exclaimed the speaker, ‘which gave them power, and which they asserted with obstinacy, irrespective of party, on all occasions, small or great.’ And now--with half a dozen Radicals in the Ministry and nearly a hundred members in the House--What had been the course of events? In 1880 a war in Afghanistan protracted for a whole year under a Liberal Government; in 1881 the revolt of the Boers, ‘with which every Radical in England was bound to sympathise,’ met by force of arms, disgracefully and unsuccessfully applied; in 1882 ‘the struggle for Egyptian freedom undertaken by Arabi Pasha, suppressed by Liberals, great towns destroyed, bloody battles fought; and estimates swollen nine millions beyond those of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration.’ And what would be the policy of the Conservative party if power were placed in their hands?