and followed with devotion, the late Lord Derby, who, more than any statesman, helped to secure the Act of 1832, and was covered with the renown of slave-trade emancipation. To him and to Mr Disraeli we owe it, that, fortunately for the country, the Tory party at this conjuncture has been able to appeal to the enlarged constituencies with renewed confidence and vigour. Its policy and sympathies are in unison with those of the country, and it has long shaken off the reproach of exclusiveness and restriction which a bygone generation of statesmen had formerly fastened upon it. It has long been maturing its power, and the very foundations upon which it rests are inconsistent with its policy ever again degenerating into cliquism or prejudice. It draws its strength from all classes alike, and must vindicate its existence by a policy which shall be comprehensive and national. The stigma of class legislation can no longer rest upon a party in which any one class would be powerless by itself, and is transferred to the noisy sects which have earned from Liberal leaders the nickname of crotchetmongers, and which openly make their own class interests the test questions to candidates on the hustings.

Under these circumstances it is probable that the dissolution of 1874, with its decisive results, will be as famous in English history as the dissolutions of 1784 and 1831. Mr Gladstone himself, by a remarkable coincidence, drew attention in his manifesto to the electors of Greenwich, to the two chapters of history which began at those dates, one of which he was, perhaps by his own act, unconsciously closing. The former dissolution effected the consolidation of the Tory party, under the guidance of Mr Pitt,

which thereupon ruled the nation for forty-six years; the latter produced a strong Liberal confederacy, under the leadership of Earl Grey, which with brief intervals has ruled the country for nearly the same space of time. Now follows another complete transference of power; and the Liberals, after varying successes and defeats, and after achievements which they are a little too demonstrative in applauding, have again in their turn been thrown to the constituencies a divided, discredited, and defeated organisation. But the surrounding incidents are marvellously different. In the two former cases, a Ministry, struggling against adverse circumstances and victorious opponents, appealed from prolonged encounters in Parliament to the deliberate judgment of the nation upon issues which were momentous and decisive, which the world appreciated, and which the English public thoroughly understood. Mr Pitt, overborne by the combined hosts of Mr Fox and Lord North, out-debated and out-voted, after a struggle which has no Parliamentary parallel-unless we except the gallant efforts of Sir R. Peel in 1834, or of Mr Disraeli in 1868appealed to the nation whether it would be governed by the sceptre of a constitutional sovereign, or the tongue of a dissolute noble and the manoeuvres of an oligarchical faction. Earl Grey represented and embodied a rising tide of passionate feeling, which the statesmen of a former generation, contrary to all the principles of Toryism, had vainly striven to repress, and appealed to the nation whether Parliament should be reformed and power redistributed. In both cases the Minister prevailed, and his opponents were scattered to the winds. But the case in 1874 is entirely different. The Minister who made the appeal is equal in re

putation, authority, and eloquence, to either of his two predecessors. The manner and consequences of his appeal are widely dissimilar to those of the eminent men to whom we have referred. He was unable to lay before the country any issues of principle to decide, or any definite policy to approve. He could not point to a factious or even an active Opposition to be destroyed. He

came out of an ambush, to snatch by suddenness and secrecy the prolongation of his power. Yet the political situation, in our judgment, will yield to neither of the two former epochs in point of historical interest, or in the novelty of the incidents by which it is surrounded. It is worthy of being weighed and understood; for it indicates the commencement of a new chapter in the history of party government, and exhibits the altered circumstances of public life introduced by the Reform Act of 1867, and the establishment of secret voting. Those to whom the party history of England for the last century and half is matter of interest, may find in the present position of politics room for the speculative inquiry whether the change in political sentiment is the accident of the hour, of no deeper significance than the national verdict of 1841, or whether it denotes a more solid and determined acceptance of political principles. When Sir Robert Peel was carried into office by a majority of 100-which, together with his control over the House of Lords and his influence on the Continent, rendered him by far the most powerful Minister of the present century the event was proved to have no deeper significance than to express utter disgust at the administrative weakness and financial incapacity of Lord Melbourne's Government. The new Cabinet differed from the old in point merely of experience and

ability, and endeavoured to govern with a party whose principles had not been placed in accord with the times, and which still retained the exclusive and repressive spirit fostered in an age of mediocrity and failure.

No one would think of comparing Mr Gladstone's Administration with that of Lord Melbourne, or Mr Disraeli in 1874 with Sir R. Peel in 1841. We do not now witness the spectacle of an effete and almost paralysed Government being replaced by an "organised hypocrisy" or mere respectable efficiency. The duel which has just closed lay between two men of historic renown and of splendid energies, and whose careers stand out in marked and definite contrast to each other, and whose parties are divided from each other in the distinctest manner by the principles which they assert, and by the mode of their organisation. Mr Gladstone represents a policy which was original, violent, and successful, which by matchless eloquence he had induced the country to accept, and which it at length, as the consequences unfolded themselves, repented of and disapproved. He had welded together for a time, in a triumphant and overwhelming manner, the discordant sections which compose the Liberal party, and had imposed upon them obedience and devotion. He carried out nearly the whole of his programme. Success was fatal

to his power, and his army was dissolved into its primitive elements of discord and confusion. Mr Disraeli represents the policy which he has consistently maintained throughout his marvellous career, of rendering the Tory party the great popular confederacy of the country, free from class prejudice and class interests, animated by respect for law, justice, and order, an efficient instrument for governing in reference to

enlightened public opinion, instead of servile obedience to interested and organised agitation. He has devoted his career and a leadership of unexampled duration to place the Tory party once more in accord with the sympathies and convictions of the people. That policy was completed by the Act of 1867. With the establishment of a popular confederacy the vocation of Liberalism, as it has hitherto existed, is gone. The nation has declared decisively in favour of the new confederacy, in preference to the haphazard combination of sects which have recently shown, by several grotesque exhibitions, that each of them regards its own class project or cherished "fad" as superior to all claims of patriotism or the common national welfare.

The characteristic feature of modern English politics has been the growth of unnecessary and prolonged agitation. And a singular part of the history of agitations--a striking proof, we should say, how little congenial they are to the soil of Englandis, that any attempt to prolong the existence of an influential league in order to promote the personal importance of its members, after its public object has been attained, has always failed. The fate which overtook the Anti-Corn-Law League and the Birmingham League after the policy of Free Trade and of Education had prevailed, ought to be remembered in future. The constant resort to agitation, which is the very life of the Liberal party, can never be regarded as a sound and rational method of conducting public affairs. The practice of agitation as a normal means of government is inconsistent with a free press and a free Parliament, and even with the formation and supremacy of a sound public opinion. In no period of our history has this pernicious practice of

governing England by leagues and agitators, in supersession of the three estates of the realm, been carried to such a dangerous extent as under the Liberal auspices of the last forty years, and especially of the last five or six. There are numbers of these leagues or societies now in existence, all of them prepared to make their particular crotchets testquestions at elections, and determined to force them upon the country, regardless of consequences, without taking the trouble of mastering the difficult details with which they are often surrounded. And since the principle of civil and religious liberty which animated the old Whig party has been successfully asserted, Liberal leadership has degenerated into a mere matter of bargaining with prominent agitators whether total surrender or partial concession would purchase their support. When the new constituencies were called into existence, all minor agitators were hushed into silence by the appearance of the great Liberal leader in the field, as a sort of successor of O'Connell, with his cry of justice to Ireland by Church, Land, and Education Acts. A large majority accepted his programme. But on its disappearance the minor characters have again come forward, stimulated and encouraged by the success of their chief, till the whole country, panic-stricken at the prospect opened, calls for legitimate and responsible government. Our view of the present state of affairs is, that the enlarged constituencies of the kingdom are weary of continued agitation even more than of Mr Gladstone's Ministry, and deliberately prefer constitutional government through responsible statesmen, to the restless selfassertion of uninstructed Leagues and demagogues.

The predominance of the Liberal party dates from the dissolution of 1831. Previous to that time the Tory party had, from 1784, held almost uninterrupted rule. It had been reconstructed by the genius of Pitt, and the principles which it was called into existence to vindicate were essentially popular. They included Free Trade and the reform of Parliament. The object was to derive from all classes of the people support to the throne and Government against the exclusive system of the great families who sought to wield the whole power of the State. The French Revolution followed, the panic from which was lashed into fury by Burke; and the consequences upon English politics can never be exaggerated. The fame of Mr Pitt himself has been obscured. His successors, to quote Mr Disraeli's words, "inherited all his errors without the latent genius which in him might have still rallied, and extricated him from the consequences of his disaster. They did not merely inherit his errors; they exaggerated, they caricatured him. rolled into power on a spring-tide of all the rampant prejudices and rancorous passions of their time. Impudently usurping the name of that party of which nationality, and therefore universality, is the essence, these pseudo-Tories made exclusion the principle of their political constitution, and restriction the genius of their commercial code." All political talent and political education appeared to have been lost for ever during the long wars which had diverted the energies of the nation.

They

It was under these circumstances that the Liberals first sprang into active existence. They reformed Parliament, and, in an arbitrary fashion, fixed the suffrage upon no intelligible principle, in a manner

which seemed to invite and encourage, notwithstanding their finality declarations, further changes. Civil and religious liberty was their flag; O'Connell was their conspicuous ally. In nine reformed Parliaments we have had the opportunity of testing the efficiency of this organisation, both in time of peace and in time of war. In that time the most successful administrators whom they produced were chiefly taken from the Tory party. If their leader, after they have held power for forty years, retires, they cannot replace him. They have no rising juniors. Their most prominent officials either sit "like a row of extinct volcanoes" in the House of Lords; or, discarded by their constituencies, despair of returning to Parliament until a new Reform Bill has enfranchised some confiding universities. The principles, the power, and even the existence of the party of 1832, have passed away. It was superseded from time to time by the men who wielded the power which was derived from the outside agitation. An impartial historian of those nine Parliaments will confess that the two parties who confronted one another at the dissolution of 1831 had in half a generation ceased to exist, so far as any traces of their identity were concerned. In the confusion which ensued, when followers would not follow and leaders could not lead-when one party deserted Lord John Russell, and Sir R. Peel, splendide mendax, as his rivals said, betrayed the other-two men stood out from the rest with clear definite aims from which they never swerved, and which at last asserted their supremacy,- Mr Cobden and Mr Disraeli. The former saw clearly enough that in an age of confused aims, and of principles and passions inherited from