W. W. S.

THE Reform Bill may now, we presume, be considered to be safe to pass. By far the most important section of it-that which determines how English counties and boroughs are hereafter to be represented in Parliament has passed through the House of Commons, and is, while we write, receiving from the House of Lords the wise and attentive consideration which it deserves. The measure has, moreover, gone through the one chamber into the other almost as placidly as if no higher interests were involved in it than the making of a turnpike road. No monster meetings have been held to speed its onward progress or to retard it, no giant petitions voted and signed with a view to startle the Peers out of their propriety. The Lords receive the Bill as the Commons hand it up to them with perfect complacency, and the Bill will, in all human probability, become law without one pulse throughout the empire beating higher from excitement, or one man's heart failing him utterly for fear.

To institute any comparison between the state of public feeling as it exists now, and that which showed itself under circumstances externally not very different six

and-thirty years ago, would be simply ridiculous. You might as well compare a lonely mountain-tarn to the Atlantic, or a penny squib to an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The last time a Reform Bill made its way into the House of Lords, people were in earnest on both sides of the question. The Tories, taught too late to forget the wrongs put upon them by their leaders, fought for dear life. The Whigs, having contrived to get the King into their power, kept him there unflinchingly. Partly by a most unscrupulous use of his name, partly because they really had a good deal to say for themselves, they roused the nation in their favour, and having roused, they kept it at fever heat, utterly regardless of consequences, immediate or remote. It was nothing to them that they had got their Bill into the House of Lords. The fight must be to get it through that august assembly; and, in order to achieve their end, they turned aside from no expedient, however perilous, which held out to them any prospect of success. To men circumstanced as they were, Mr Attwood and the political unions were of the greatest possible use. The Government of the day entered

with them into constant and confidential communication, and the work was done. Mobs, well organised, had it all their own way in Bristol, Nottingham, Glasgow, and London. Recusant lords were pelted in the streets, the police holding back; and in the country itself the lives of Tory gentlemen were not safe from Reformers, who hunted them through their own parks and into their own houses. Even the Great Duke, besides getting his windows broken, narrowly escaped being torn to pieces, and that, too, on the 18th of June. There was something like earnestness in all this, whatever else there might be. But now the utmost that can be said of Whig tactics and Liberal enthusiasm is, that for a twelvemonth and more a certain number of public men -some distinguished, others notorious-have been striving to play over again a desperate game, and have signally failed. No-no; the Liberal leaders of 1866-67 will never fill the shoes of the Liberal leaders of 1831-32. The latter understood what they were about. Circumstances favoured them, no doubt, and they knew how to take advantage of them. They went in boldly for a great revolution,- -a bloodless one-if it should be possible to avoid bloodshed, a revolution which would even spare the outward forms of things, provided their rivals gave way and allowed the Bill to pass. But of their determination to risk all-the existence of the House of Lords and of the monarchy itself -rather than fail, they made no secret; and fail they did not. How immeasurably below such a level as this stand their successors in every respect! They, too, went in for a revolution. They produced their Reform Bill. It was resisted, pulled to pieces, and withdrawn; and all that they have since achieved is, to convince the world that, with every disposition to act as their predecessors did six-and

thirty years ago, they lacked the power. What effect upon the minds of men was exercised by the most violent of Mr Gladstone's and Mr Bright's speeches last year, in comparison with Lord John Russell's one spirited appeal to the people in 1831 against the "breath of a faction"? What proportion do Mr Beales's operations bear to the threatened march in 1832 of 100,000 men from Birmingham upon London? How do the fiercest of Mr Potter's threats read when placed side by side with the correspondence between Mr Perry and the late Sir William Napier, and Mr Hume's serious proposal to put arms into the hands of the people, in order to protect a Reform Government and House of Commons from coercion? The Hyde Park riot was, to be sure, a very disgraceful affair, of which we are inclined to believe that most of those who took part in it are by this time heartily ashamed. The truth is, that in the movement which has resulted in giving the country a Tory Administration and a Tory Reform Bill, there has never been more than the merest shadow of reality. It began under false pretences sixteen or eighteen years ago; it has been carried on ever since through a series of shams; and it ends in giving us what we have now got, as much to the surprise as to the undisguised regret and indignation of the very men who first set the ball in motion. What are we to think of all this, and how, under the circumstances, are we to designate the conduct of those to whom the country is indebted for so remarkable a consummation?

It is impossible to look back upon the course of events since 1846 without being driven to the conclusion that the policy of the Liberal party, ever since Sir Robert Peel broke in upon their monopoly of office, has been thoroughly selfish and unpatriotic. The conditions of his fall on that occasion renewed, so to speak, their self-assurance.

The vessel appeared to have righted itself, and there was no need either to take in or to cast out ballast. Besides that the Tory party was broken to pieces, the Whigs knew that when hard pressed they would find support from Peel and his friends; and Peel and his friends were as deeply pledged as men could be to maintain that constitution which they had accepted with reluctance against all comers. For some years, therefore, not a word was uttered indicative of any purpose on the part of Whig Ministers to extend or meddle with the franchise; and every move in that direction which their supporters below the gangway made was repressed at once, and not always in the most conciliatory manner. Observe, we do not mean to insinuate that at any time between 1846 and 1850 Peel himself, or Mr Gladstone, or Mr Cardwell, or any other of Peel's immediate adherents, had come to an understanding with Lord John Russell on any question of general policy. Quite otherwise. There was quite as much at that time to divide Peel from Lord John as there was to stand between Peel himself and Mr Disraeli. And just before his death, the line which Peel took gave some indication of a purpose on his part, sooner or later, to bridge over the gulf which had too long separated him from his proper followers. But partly because personal feeling ran strong on both sides-partly because, on fiscal and commercial subjects, the Tories retained, or were believed to retain, a good many of their old opinions-Peel, who had become a thorough convert to free trade, preferred keeping a free-trade Ministry in office, to the risk which he apprehended of a return to a policy of protection were the new Tory party to carry Downing Street by storm. It was this fear-perfectly groundless, as events have shown-which induced him over and over again to throw the weight of his influence into the Whig scale

when it seemed in danger of kicking the beam; and the knowledge that they had his powerful support to rely upon kept the Whigs straight, their sole object being the retention of that monopoly of office which the great measure of 1832 was intended to secure to them.

The death of Sir Robert Peel came like a great public misfortune on the country, and a great public misfortune it really was. We have never pretended to be blind to his defects, which were those perhaps of temperament rather than of intellect or even of heart. He was naturally cold, shy, and reticent, winning the affections of few in private life, and repelling in public, by faults of manner, the great bulk of his followers. But he was an honest as well as an able man. While he lived, his party, weak in point of numbers as it was, held the balance even between progress and precipitancy. His party, without him, soon dissolved itself. The more ambitious and headstrong among its members fell off by degrees into pure Liberalism; the wiser and better portion gradually made common cause with the Tories. From that hour the tactics of the Whigs underwent a change. The pressure from below became more severe. Their opponents on the Tory benches ran them hard on various occasions; and office, which was life itself to them, seemed to be in danger. Then, for the first time, there was heard from the Treasury seats an indication that some further extension of the franchise might be desirable. It was not as yet very decided, and it met with a rather cold response elsewhere; yet it sufficed to indicate the line of action which that section of the party from which it emanated was prepared to follow should the progress of events force them to the adoption of strong measures. And the progress of events took exactly the direction which the advocates of change had anticipated.

It would be foreign to the object of the present discussion were we to follow the Whigs in their downward course-through the Coalition Government and its results, the war in the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny, and Sir John Bowring's war with China. These incidents, indeed, and especially the construction of Lord Aberdeen's Administration, are, for our present purpose, noticeable only so far as they enable us to trace out the process by which the fusion between the more aspiring of the Peel party and the Whigs became complete. For at first there was in the former a marked indisposition to run in couples with the latter. The late Lord Herbert, in particular, with his friends Sir James Graham and Mr Gladstone, entertained a rooted aversion to an alliance which would bind them to politicians whom they did not hesitate to describe as narrow and selfish in all their views. But when, with admirable tact, Lord Palmerston succeeded in persuading his late colleagues to submit to the feeble guidance of Lord Aberdeen, then the scruples of the Peelites gave way. And good reason there was. Lord Aberdeen belonged to their own school. He took care to place them in prominent positions. The Duke of Newcastle went to the Colonies, Mr Gladstone became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir James Graham took the Admiralty, and Sidney Herbert the War Office. Lord Palmerston's proper place would have been the Foreign Office, but this Lord John Russell claimed as his own; and the man among them all best qualified to manage the foreign affairs of the country at a critical moment, was relegated to the Home Office. We need not stop to explain how this extraordinary jumble worked. From the first day of their meeting till they broke up amid the disasters of the campaign in the Crimea, Lord Aberdeen's Ministry was at strife with itself; and when the

crash came, there were scarcely two among its members who, if we except Sidney Herbert and the Duke of Newcastle, had a good word to say one of the other. Still, those years of troublesome office, that association in a common disaster, that loss of reputation to themselves, that season of calamity to the nation-these things sufficed to decide, for Mr Gladstone_and the more ambitious of the Peelites, the line which they should hereafter take. The Tories had

not spared them. They had no claim upon the forbearance of the party; and public opinion justified the harshest sentence which was passed in Parliament on their lack of administrative ability. Vain and sensitive men could not forgive this; and they took their revenge by passing in a body over into the ranks of the Liberals.

While the Peelites were gliding through this coalition into the ranks of fierce Liberalism, Lord John Russell, dissatisfied with his position as a subordinate to Lord Aberdeen, broke off from his colleagues, and raised again the question of Parliamentary Reform. The project made little way, because public attention was fixed at the moment upon other and more urgent matters; but it by no means fell dead to the ground. Parliamentary government, as Prince Albert expressed it, had been upon its trial during the war; and the stanchest advocates of things as they were could not but acknowledge that it was far from coming unscathed out of the ordeal. Hence the minds of men were better prepared than for many years previously they had been to accept as truths propositions which had at least a good deal of plausibility in them; and the way was paved for that systematic abuse of popular credulity, of which, for good or for evil, we are at this moment witnessing the results.

It is too late now to ask the question whether the Constitution of

1832 had ceased to satisfy the just requirements of the country. For our own part, as we resisted the introduction of that Constitution six-and-thirty years ago, so we have never been able to close our eyes against the many shortcomings with which it is chargeable. A monopoly of political influence in the hands of the shopkeeping class in large towns had not much to commend it to our approval; and the retention by Whig magnates of the few pocket-boroughs which the old Reform Bill spared, was as glaring a case of party legislation as the world could show. Still, upon the whole, we taught ourselves to be content with what the Whigs had given us; and so, we believe, did the people at large. And if we, and such as we, became reconciled to our fate, surely it was not for the lovers of change to find fault with Parliaments elected mainly by £10 householders. If these did not originate a policy of unrestricted commerce, they carried it forward with a firm hand. If they did not repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, and admit Roman Catholics to Parliament, they certainly never looked back at any time upon that starting-point with any desire, secret or avowed, of travelling back again over the ground they had thus left behind them. At the same time, we arrogate no right to ourselves of finding fault with others who differ from us in opinion. Mr Bright is not the author of the settlement of 1832. He is perfectly justified, according to his own lights, in desiring to replace it with something better. And Lord Russell and Mr Gladstone likewise, the former because he is the author of the settlement-the latter, for any reason or for no reason which he may be pleased to adduce, are as free as Mr Bright to demand for the working classes that they shall be fully represented in the Commons House of Parliament. But what we really do not understand is this,

that Lord Russell, Mr Gladstone, Mr Bright, and their friends, should go about wringing their hands at the result, and protesting that not only have they sustained an irreparable personal injury, but that the country is about to be ruined by the passing of a Reform Bill. In the name of common-sense--and we ask the question purely for information's sake-what is it for which these gentlemen have been clamouring day and night throughout the last dozen years at least ? Were their schemes mere pretences all this while? Did they not, in reality, desire to see any of them carried into effect? Does the bond of relationship-the "flesh and blood" tie-exist no longer between them and the people? Or have Lord Derby and Mr Disraeli committed the gross mistake of trying to bring too great a crowd of poor voters into the political net? Again, we ask, what is it that Lord Russell, Mr Gladstone, Mr Bright, and other leaders of the great Liberal party desire? They had their chance, and lost it. They were afforded afforded the opportunity of concocting a Reform Bill of their own, and could not carry it through the House of Commons. Why are they down-hearted because Mr Disraeli has been more fortunate than they? Is his measure less liberal than theirs-less in accord with the temper of the timesless likely to stop further agitation? Quite otherwise. They proposed to admit to the exercise of the franchise every occupant of a house paying £7 rent in boroughs-every holder of land in counties rented at £15. Mr Disraeli's measureif his we are justified in calling it

extends these privileges in counties to the holders of £12 farms, and in boroughs to the occupants of houses, no matter what the rental may be, who are rated to the poor, and pay their own rates. Surely the friends of the people cannot complain of this; or if they do, it must be on grounds alto