The constituency wish our union, I wish it too--but personal relations need not be renewed. Lord Enfield considers himself and Lord George Hamilton to be what he is pleased to call "scions of a noble stock." I am a man of the middle class. He considers himself my superior. Let us agree to differ on this point.--Yours truly, HENRY LABOUCHERE. "It is fortunate," remarked the _Times_, "that the Liberal majority bids fair to be a large one, for otherwise the future historians of Great Britain might have a somewhat undignified episode to narrate in the electioneering contest of 1868, between the two great parties of the State. If the Liberals and the Conservatives happened to be running each other so closely that one seat more or less might determine the policy of the new Parliament, the Middlesex election would probably have an odd part to play in British annals. Every reader of Liberal imagination can easily conjure up for himself a picture of the calamities that might, under evil stars, overtake this country if the Liberals found themselves not strong enough to carry out their present programme, and the Irish Church were left still standing, with Ireland, as the natural result of so much anxious and fruitless agitation, more discontented than ever. Let him then suppose that all these imagined misfortunes had to be borne in consequence of his party having lost a seat for Middlesex, because Lord Enfield objects 'on personal grounds' to Mr. Labouchere! Lord Chesterfield has told us that great events are really due to much smaller causes than historians, with a duly jealous regard for the dignity of their profession, dare admit. The Liberal majority in the next Parliament might, if it so happened, be lost and the programme of national policy at a critical moment reversed because Mr. Labouchere has called Lord Enfield 'a sneak,' and Lord Enfield objects to Mr. Labouchere's want of blue blood! We doubt whether Gibbon himself could give the proper professional air of historical dignity to such an episode {89} in the decline and fall of Great Britain as this. According to the first report of this squabble we read, Lord Enfield distinctly refused to meet Mr. Labouchere, while Mr. Labouchere, after showing that he had hitherto all along conducted himself as a very model of meekness, bearing endless snubs and rebuffs from his haughty adversary for the public good, suddenly turned round and insisted that he would 'fight single-handed' without any reference to his brother Liberal. It appears that, if the Liberals work properly, the Conservative candidate, despite all the advantages of high birth and impetuous youth, ought to be beaten, but that otherwise he has a chance of success. It would be too bad if a Liberal seat were thus endangered, and we trust Lord Enfield will accept Mr. Labouchere's compromise, and console himself by reflecting that he can still object as strenuously as ever to his plebeian adversary in private."[20]