A correspondent sigining himself “Dynamite” sends us the following:—“Those who take the Constitutional side in this great Franchise Agitation are from time to time indebted to their opponents for some energetic expression of the truth, or some happy illustration of the fallacy of the Radical position. Mr. Bright’s emphatic denunciation of all Franchise Bills which did not also deal with Redistribution deserves, and will I trust obtain, the widest publicity: the Hyde Park banners emblazoned with ’The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill!’ was a capital thought; they ought to be bought up and used at all Conservative meetings: and the Franchise-medal, used at the Birmingham meeting on Monday, inscribed “Our Queen, our country, and our rights; the Constitution in all its fulness for the people of the United Kingdom,” is exactly what Conservatives should delight to wear. And now Mr. Chamberlain presents us with a most appropriate metaphor. I quote his exact words as spoken at Birmingham:—
I have read somewhere of a patient who was ordered a shower-bath by his physician. He had never seen one before, and when he was introduced to the startling invention he stoutly declared “I will not enter that machine without an umbrella.” (Laughter and cheers.) Now Lord Salisbury insists on an umbrella (laughter): he will not submit the Constitution to a bracing shower of new votes unless he can preserve it from the shock by a carefully manipulated scheme of redistribution.
We ought to be extremely obliged to Mr. Chamberlain for having hunted up a metaphor so exactly suited to the Conservative orators. He has not got the details quite right, but the correction is easily made. The patient discovered that there was only one hole at the top of the shower-bath, through which the whole of the water would have fallen en masse upon one shoulder only; and prudently declared ‘I will not enter that machine until a proper system of holes are made, so that the water may be fairly distributed.’ Every one knows that the bracing effect of a shower-bath wholly depends on this distribution. Let us return thanks to Mr. Chamberlain for so admirably illustrating a great truth.”