arquis who is more to your left [Lord
Salisbury], that I now nail to the counter any proposal to call me a
political bagman as wanting in originality and wit. [Laughter.]

But I have been doing a certain amount of light travelling in behalf of
our excellent and creditable firm. The other day, on returning from
Manchester, I was deeply and hideously impressed with the fact that all
along that line of railway which we traversed, the whole of a pleasing
landscape was entirely ruined by appeals to the public to save their
constitutions but ruin their aesthetic senses by a constant application
of a particular form of pill. [Laughter and cheers.]

Now, Sir Frederic, I view that prospect with the gravest misgiving. What
is to become of our English landscape if it is to be simply a sanitary
or advertising appliance? [Laughter.] I appeal to my right honorable
friend the Chancellor of the Duchy [James Bryce], who sits opposite to
me. His whole heart is bound up in a proposition for obtaining free
access to the mountains of the Highlands. But what advantage will it be
to him, or to those whose case he so justly and eloquently espouses, if
at the top of Schiehallion, or any other mountain which you may have in
your mind's eye, the bewildered climber can only find an advertisement
of some remedy of the description of which I have mentioned [cheers], an
advertisement of a kind common, I am sorry to say, in the United
States--and I speak with reverence in the presence of the ambassador of
that great community--but it would be in the Highlands distressing to
the deer and infinitely perplexing even to the British tourist.
[Laughter and cheers.]

But I turned my eyes mentally from the land, and I said that, after all,
the great painter of the present may turn to the sea, and there at least
he is safe. There are effects on the ocean which no one can ruin, which
not even a pill can impair. [Laughter.] But I was informed in
confidence--it caused me some distress--that the same enterprising firm
which has placarded our rural recesses, has offered a mainsail free of
expense to every ship that will accept it, on condition that it bears
the same hideous legend upon it to which I have referred. [Laughter.]
Think, Mr. President, of the feelings of the illustrious Turner if he
returned to life to see the luggers and the coasting ships which he has
made so glorious in his paintings, converted into a simple vehicle for
the advertisement of a quack