ABSTRACT
The Liberal party have plenty of representative assemblies, but it has only one which can pretend to any kind of general authority. One valuable theme for Opposition oratory, as was proved by the November gain of a Lancashire seat at Middleton, was the heavy and expensive campaign proceeding on the North-West Frontier of plague- and famine-stricken India. In the speech Chamberlain delivered on January 19th to the Liverpool Constitutional Association, the same astonishing virtuosity of popular platform performance was directed against his domestic opponents. The shock inflicted by Salisbury’s language seems to have been the greater from the fact that the Continent had been looking to him to keep Chamberlain’s Imperialism in check. Meanwhile the strain that the "public’s" Imperialist mood put upon the Opposition leadership was rising. While Sir William Harcourt and Morley were known to have but the scantiest sympathy with the latest developments of Imperialism, Lord Rosebery made his hearty approval very obvious.
