to the best light which could be brought to bear on them, were really and truly for the welfare of the community. Statesmanship was understood and acknowledged to require great natural power, and sustained and vigorous training. Young men who showed conspicuous promise at the Bar or at the Universities were brought forward, put early into Parliament for private boroughs, and disciplined in the best school for political work.

like the elder Pitt or Canning at a sufficiently early age to enable them to learn their business; and as the heads of our public offices are still necessarily chosen from among the Parliamentary leaders, the administration of public business falls deeper every year into contempt.

Gradually from being a representation of the intelligence of the country, Parliament has become merely a representation of conflicting interests. A man is made a member of the Legislature, not because he has shown power and character, and can be trusted to consider by his own judgment what measures are good or are not good. The public feeling of the country is settled out of doors on the public platforms at the great towns. The representative is the agent of the constituency, not the brain and heart of it; tied and bound with pledges, he is selected because he will vote straight as he is ordered. For such a purpose one member is as good as another. There is no need of mind and experience, of patriotism and probity. Those who are ready to pay for the honour of this inglorious lacqueydom are preferred naturally to those who have no purse to recommend them. The few constituencies where great families retain influence enough to command a return are occupied by relations who can be depended on to stand by their order; and on the other hand there is sufficient traditionary liking for the aristocracy to enable a young well-born aspirant to fame to find favour in a great town if he will denounce the class to which he belongs, cant about the sacred rights of the people, the beauties of liberty, and the iniquity of class privileges. But not the slightest chance remains of introducing into Parliament men

The beginning of the alteration is of old date; it was consummated five years ago, when Mr. Disraeli carried the second Reform Bill which Mr. Gladstone had made inevitable. The concession was made at a time when there was no demand for it on the part of the people, and so far, therefore, the opportunity was wisely chosen. The artisans had lost confidence in the power of Parliament to remedy the evils which pressed hardest on themselves. Their own battles they had learned to fight elsewhere with organisations of their own contriving, and their unions remain, as they have been from the first, unpolitical. Of the earnest among the newly enfranchised voters, not half, at the last election, cared to use their privilege. At any working men's club it will be found now that unless their votes are placed for them on the register, not one in ten will take the pains to qualify himself for the polling booth. Their admission in such a humour was of course infinitely safer than if it had been conceded in fear after a struggle, and the people had been led to believe that the franchise would open the gates of Paradise to them. So far the effect has been to make the constituencies one degree more corrupt than they were before. Those chiefly used their vote who could turn it to immediate practical account, and the result was the richest and the least intelligent Parliament which has ever sat in England; while the administration resulting from it, though backed by an exceptionally large and exceptionally docile majority, is the

weakest which has ever pretended to govern England; and the constitutional system has sunk a degree or two lower in the confidence and respect of intelligent persons. Mr. Lowe, however, who foretold correctly what the first reformed Parliament would be like, foretold also that the second would not resemble it. The fact remains that we lie at the mercy of the democracy, and of the ideas, wise or unwise, to which it may please them to surrender themselves.

A sphinx sits by the political roadside in every country in Europe propounding the new enigma of labour and capital. On what terms are the thousands who work with their hands and the tens who employ them to live together? This is the problem which each statesman who aspires to govern must answer. If he has no answer to give but the economist's, that labour has its market value, like any other chattel, and that he has nothing to do with it, the sphinx will devour him. If, after long waiting, no Edipus can be found who will discover a solution, the sphinx will ultimately destroy the whole condition of society which admits of no more human terms of confederation between man and man. It is no secret that the ideas of the million on this subject differ by a whole diameter from those who are satisfied with things as they are. It is equally certain that when the million see their way towards embodying their views in political form, their interest in Parliament, which is now so languid, will become energetic and vital; and if they please it, without violence and by the organised exercise of the power which is already in their hands, they can convert the household suffrage into universal suffrage, split the country into electoral districts, and return a House of Commons prepared to venture on those socialistic experiments which the disciples of Adam

Smith and McCulloch believe to be as childish as attempts to make water run uphill.

The Prime Minister has more than once expressed a wish to see working-men in the House of Commons. With a natural affection for a trade of which he is himself a master so accomplished, he regards a House of Commons debate as the most perfect machinery for detecting fallacies, separating truth from falsehood, and discovering the unsound places in new or untried proposals. Doubtless, the sifting process of a discussion drags to light such features as are unpalatable, and seem therefore unsound, to the debating body as at any particular moment it happens to be constituted. Yet for how many years did the arguments, for instance, for maintaining the Irish Establishment appear to Mr. Gladstone and the House of Commons unanswerable and the objections to be fallacious? For how many years were there annual motions for the repeal of the Corn Laws? yet till the Irish famine came to the help of Mr. Cobden, the House of Commons continued unconvinced. When the temper of the tribunal is changed, when the bias of commodity' alters its inclination, and interest shifts its scale, reason

becomes unreason and unreason reason.. One or two Trades Union spokesmen, made of the light stuff which, when the liquor in the vat begins to work, is first flung to the surface, would, doubtless, be extremely welcome to the present House. The artisan will be heard through his representative, and to the entire satisfaction of the enormous majority of the listeners demolished utterly. He will have had his audience in the face of the world; he will have been treated with the kind condescension which can be afforded safely in a hopeless case, and dismissed with gentle ridicule. Yet, if in the place of two

or three workmen or workmen's representatives, there were two, three, or four hundred, the position might be the same, the arguments on both sides the same, yet the results would not be the same. The Prime Minister himself, who believes so strongly in the detective power of parliamentary discussion, is open also, unless he is much maligned, to the weight of reason which lies in a majority.

The last Reform Bill was probably a necessity, though the Conservatives ought never to have meddled with it. If the Conservatives, when they came into power, had said that Reform Bills were no business of theirs, that if the people wanted Reform Bills they must buy them at the other shop; that for themselves they would attend to their own province and repair the leaks in the administration, they would have been turned out perhaps in 1866; but they would have been in office now with educated England at their backs. Yet the extension of the suffrage was defensible and probably just. As in mechanics motion and heat are the same essentially, and are convertible one into the other, but where one gains the other loses so in human society, it is with power and wealth. If those who hold its higher places think first of their duties, and care little or but moderately for their wages, no one grudges them political superiority, and they are trusted with authority which they show that they are fit to use. The spread of democracy in any country is an inevitable indication that duty and wages are changing places. The upper classes are beginning to value their rank as a means of getting more money and enjoying more luxuries; they use their political privileges for the advantage of themselves or their order; and as soon as it becomes a question of interest, all interests are entitled equally to consideration. The poor have as much

right to be cared for as the rich; and if unconsidered by others, they have a right to a position in which they can look out for themselves. From the moment that it becomes admitted as a rule of practical life, that the first duty of a man is to himself, that the best of all possible worlds would be one, as Lord Macaulay puts it, where everybody

exerted himself to the utmost to better his own condition and left his neighbour to do the same, the universality of the suffrage, unless we are prepared to fall back on military force, becomes merely a question of time, and must be conceded when the people choose to ask for it. When land and trade and the learned professions have their representatives to look after their interests, the handworkers are entitled equally to theirs. The respective proportions will adjust themselves by degrees to the relative numbers; and since all these interests conflict, or seem to conflict, it is possible that a series of Parliaments lies before us in which employers and labourers are to try their strength against each other, with a certain victory to the proletariat at one stage or other of the conflict.

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In some respects this will be no more than a continuation of a process which has gone on already for many years: a process by which social inequalities are gradually and peaceably removed, and we get the benefit of revolution, while escape its miseries. The future, perhaps, may continue to be of the same easy and gratifying kind; but there are some features in the position of things which suggest that the movement may become more rapid. Parliament visibly deteriorates, and is regarded with diminishing respect; all important questions are left to be decided first by the multitude out of doors; and, while ministers are converted into the instruments of a House of Com

mons majority, the members of the House of Commons are, again, nothing but the instruments of the constituencies. Intellectual inferiority among the heads of departments becomes inevitable when the position is made so distasteful that the nobler order of men cease to seek it; the Executive authority is weak to imbecility in the presence of popular tumults, because it feels unconsciously that the people are its masters; while in departments in which the general public is ignorant or indifferent, it goes its own way, and that very often a bad way, without control or responsibility. These mischiefs are on the surface, and visible to every eye, and are sufficient in themselves to create some uneasiness. They would be less felt if we had confidence in the person who at present presides over the fortunes of the Empire. It is precisely the character of Mr. Gladstone, however, which is the gravest occasion of the universal dissatisfaction. There is nothing in the present temper of the country politically alarming. We have social sore places, which are extending from neglect. The great towns have outgrown our skill in management; and mischievous forces are at work which by-and-by may produce serious derangements. But there are no formal political complaints. The attempts of demagogues to manufacture grievances were never more utterly futile. England is not republican. There is no country in the world where equality is less believed in. The clerk looks down on the mechanic, because the mechanic works with his hands. The mechanic looks down on the unskilled labourer as if he were a being of another caste; and the social circles over which their wives preside are as exclusive as fine ladies' drawingrooms. However absurd this may be, it is not socialism, and implies feelings which, as long as they

exist, make socialism impossible. The strongest powers among us are the least noisy. Sir Charles Dilke knows by this time that he has made an enormous mistake. Republican orators if they show in the provinces are pelted off the stage, the mob itself being on the side of loyalty. Long ago Mr. Bright described agitation for Reform as whipping a dead horse.

Yet the dead horse was made to move, and made to move by Mr. Gladstone's agency. Household suffrage was not asked for, yet it is the law of the land; the ballot is not asked for, yet the ballot will be carried too. The people are now apathetic, therefore, they are to be trusted with powers which, when they did ask for them, were steadily withheld, as equivalent to revolution. Indifference to the use of dangerous weapons is a reason why such weapons are to be put into their hands.

What does it mean ? What is it for? The position of the present Prime Minister as the leader of the great English Liberal party is one of the most curious phenomena in political history. Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington carrying Catholic emancipation and Mr. Disraeli extending the suffrage were both of them breaking traditional rules and outraging the sense of the country. But in both instances the motive was plain. There was nothing mysterious, nothing unexplained, nothing to suggest vague suspicion of ulterior ends. Mr. Disraeli has not become a Radical because he carried one of the five points of the Charter. Peel saw that he must choose between concession and civil war; but he never pretended that emancipation was a thing to be desired in itself, exalted the achievement of it into a triumph of principle, or talked significantly of mysterious blessings to be expected from it. We desire to know what Mr. Gladstone is about, and

the cloud on his mind is as thick as the veil of Isis. Mr. Gladstone, as we all know, commenced his political career as an ardent High Churchman. His book on 'Church and State' was selected by Macaulay as the best representation of the principles which, as a Liberal, he considered ridiculous and mischievous. A book on 'Rationalism' followed; obscure, indefinite, yet pitched in the same key. It was a lay manifesto parallel to and in harmony with the Oxford Tracts; and though his literary power was insignificant, his rising fame as a speaker gave importance to his published thought. For many years after this he appeared to be occupied exclusively with his public duties; but in Parliament, in all matters in which the Church was concerned, directly or indirectly, he threw his influence consistently on the illiberal side. He opposed rigidly the first attempts at opening the Universities. When John Blackett, whose early death deprived the Liberal party of the truest-hearted of its rising members, advocated lighter measures of reform than the present Ministry have assisted at last in carrying, Mr. Gladstone abused his high position in the House to crush him with gratuitous cruelty; and Oxford rewarded her champion's devotion by accepting him as a representative in whose hands as long as he survived she believed herself safe from spoliation.

Mr. Gladstone's pen, meanwhile, if it continued busy, was engaged where it cannot be traced in anonymous articles in reviews. At length, some ten years ago, when, as a politician, he had given signs of wavering in his first faith, he again came before the public with a book on Homer, and an address on Homer to the students of the University of Edinburgh. The first impressions were of surprise and pleasure, that a busy statesman

should have made leisure in the intervals of business to imitate Canning and Peel, and keep his mind fresh and sweet by continued study of the purest and noblest writer of the old world. The book itself, like all Mr. Gladstone's writings, was unequal to his fame. He had read Homer apparently by the light of the House of Commons

he admired Achilles for quali ties which, probably, no critic in the world had ever before selected as characteristic of him-because he was such a splendid debater, because he was so great in reply. Helen came in for favour it was at first hard to see why; while as a real contribution to Homeric literature, fit to take its place beside the works of the great German scholars, it very soon appeared that these volumes had no pretensions at all. Yet both book and address, if valueless in point of scholarship or poetical criticism, were curious as indicating the workings of Mr. Gladstone's own mind. In opposition to the universal German opinion, to the opinion of every distinguished Greek scholar in Europe, they were written to maintain the Catholic hypothesis of the Noachic traditions-arabesqued, and elaborated by Mr. Gladstone's own speculations. The most profound Christian mysteries were assumed to have been communicated to the Patriarchs; the mythologies of the Aryan nation to have been corrupt versions of spiritual truths made known prophetically to Adam or to Noah; the gods f Olympus to have had some marellous affinity with the theology of St. Paul and St. John.

We are not concerned with this theory, further than to say, that it has been long abandoned by all thinkers on the subject who prefer reason and enquiry and common sense to Catholic tradition. acceptance of it by Mr. Gladstone illustrates at once his tendency to dispense with accurate knowledge in

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