OUR SHABBY CONTEMPORARIES
We have a bone to pick with our contemporaries. In reporting the speech of Lord Palmerston, at Perth, they recorded a passage in which the noble Lord suggested that those who saw and heard things that were going wrong, should communicate them to the public officer whose duty it is to put them right, which would be conferring a great favour on the man in office, as well as doing a benefit of magnitude to the country at large. They represent his Lordship as saying, in continuation:—
"There may be a great deal of chaff in that which is received—but if in a bushel of chaff he shall find a pint of good corn, that bushel of chaff would be worth winnowing, and he can turn that pint of corn to good purposes."
But why has that been omitted which followed of course, and by the omission of which the above extract is made to conclude with abruptness—to read, as it were, broken off, stumpy? What motive, but a mean one, was there for suppressing what Lord Palmerston must have gone on to say?—namely, that in communicating to Government information respecting things that go wrong, mixed up with chaff, the most essential services had been rendered to an applauding nation by a popular periodical—which modesty prevents Punch from more distinctly alluding to.