hat
awakens a feeling of the bonds of mankind, in the thought that you
here and in the other burghs--(shipmen, artificers, craftsmen, and
shopkeepers living here)--are brought through me, and through your
responsibility in electing me, into contact with all these hundreds
of millions across the seas. Therefore it is that I will not make any
apology to you for my choice of a subject to-night. Let me say
this, not only to you gentlemen here, but to all British
constituencies--that it is well you should have patience enough to
listen to a speech about India; because it is no secret to anybody who
understands, that if the Government were to make a certain kind of bad
blunder in India--which I do not at all expect them to make--there
would be short work for a long time to come, with many of those
schemes, upon which you have set your heart. Do not dream, if any
mishap of a certain kind were to come to pass in India that you can
go on with that programme of social reforms, all costing money and
absorbing attention, in the spirit in which you are now about to
pursue it.

I am not particularly fond of talking of myself, but there is one
single personal word that I would like to say, and my constituency is
the only place in which I should not be ashamed to say that word. You,
after all, are concerned in the consistency of your representative.
Now I think a public man who spends overmuch time in vindicating
his consistency, makes a mistake. I will confess to you in friendly
confidence, that I have winced when I read of lifelong friends of
mine saying that I have, in certain Indian transactions, shelved the
principles of a lifetime. One of your countrymen said that, like the
Python--that fabulous animal who had the largest swallow that any
creature ever enjoyed--I have swallowed all my principles. I am a
little disappointed at such clatter as this. When a man has laboured
for more years than I care to count, for Liberal principles and
Liberal causes, and thinks he may possibly have accumulated a little
credit in the bank of public opinion--and in the opinion of his party
and his friends--it is a most extraordinary and unwelcome surprise to
him, when he draws a very small cheque indeed upon that capital, to
find the cheque returned with the uncomfortable and ill-omened words,
"No effects." I am not going to defend myself. A long time ago a
journalistic colleague, who was a little uneasy at some line I took
upon this question or t