EVE OF ELECTIONS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 134, 3 December 1910, Page 5

EVE OF ELECTIONS.

ADDRESSES BY LIBERAL CHIEFS. TORIES AND REFERENDUM. THE COUNSEL OF DESPERATE MEN.. Bj Telegraph.— Press Association.— Copyricht, (Received December 3, 8.5 a.m.) LONDON, 2nd December. The election campaign is being actively continued by the leading orators of both the political parties. I Viscount Morley, Lord President of the Council, speaking at DaTwen, in j Lancashire, recalled the fact that Lord Rosebery and himself were the only surviving members of the Gladstone Cabinet of 1886. Lord Rosebery never cried out against American dollars then. The Conservatives, continued Lord Morley, were watering down, not abandoing, the hereditary principles. There was a deal of fantastic, ill-considered, and ill-informed talk about the referendum, which would destroy the Parliamentary system. . Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary, in a speech at Portsmouth, said that Mr. Balfour's declaration about the referendum was the counsel of desperate men and looked much like jettisoning tariff reform. The question of Home Rule .for Island was unfit for a referendum to the whole of the United Kingdom. If they were going to submit a constitutional question to the country, let it be the question of general devolution. DIRECT VOTING. MR. ASQUITH'S "FLIRTATIONS." IN HIS SALAD DAYS. LIBERALS OBJECT TO THE PRINCIPLE. LONDON, 2nd December. Mr. Asquith, Prime Minister, yesterday addressed a gathering of 5000 persons at Wolverhamptou. Dealing with tarifi reform, Mr. Asquith showed that while the House of •Lords was being rebuilt and the mechanism of the referendum developed, with tariff reform on the shelf, the Union- | ists would be totally unable to make a binding bargain with the Dominions at the coming Imperial Conference except ■with the "if" of a- referendum. "Liberals," said the Premier, "object to a referendum ; therefore it is pointless to ask whether they will submit the question of Home Rule to a referendum. My 'flirtations' with the referendum were made twelva or thirteen years ago, in my comparative political immaturity. Since then people have had a good deal of experience of its actual working in Switzerland, in some of the American States, in Canada, and in Australia. In the light of this I have now come to the conclusion that the referendum has proved in practice jto be a most disappointing and nni satisfactory way of ascertaining public opinion. One proof of this is the very small percentage of votes polled compared with a general election."