Our market regulations, and insistance on the purity of products; our factory regulations, and interference with the freedom of labour; our meddling with the rate of wages; with the employment of children; their education; the housing of the working classes; pension projects; even the Companies' Act and Money-lending Bill, all these are strictly anti - Liberal measures: interferences, in the interest of the general, with the higgling of the market, and the right of the individual to swindle and oppress. They constitute, as a body of legislation, which should be considered in its entirety, a marked reversion to the ideas of the Tudor, or organic, or national, period: and are distinctly socialistic, in the sense in which Toryism itself is necessarily socialistic, because it is founded on a respect for the social organism. Toryism, it is perhaps as well to say, for the benefit of weak-kneed brethren, may be distinguished by its enforcement of a constant regulation and reformation of the body politic, or its maintenance in good health; as opposed to as opposed to socialism, which would insist on the destruction of all economic and political institutions, as preliminary to an attempt to form a theoretical polity. Now here, precisely, we have a fertile source of confusion, which it is a chief object of this paper to remove. The survivors of the

of dead dogmas, and with the fear of radical spoliation in their hearts, have taken refuge, manufacturers and all, in the ranks of our so-called Conservative party: to which their influence must necessarily be destructive unless kept in check; unless, in a word, the party sets steadily before its eyes the pure principles of Toryism. It is no doubt right, as well as inevitable, for us to profit by the accession of numerical strength— to avail ourselves of the numbers and individual weight of this ex-Liberal reinforcement. But that is no reason why we should allow either the early politicoeconomical, or liberalised, training of our own rank and file, or the presence in our camp of this strong element of refugee Liberalism-the ci-devants of Manchesterdom to influence our creed. We are menaced by dangers from within as well as from without; by a rising discontent amongst our strongest partisans, as well as by the contempt and distrust of the mass of indifferent voters who govern the swing of the pendulum ; because neither we ourselves, nor the country at large, appreciate clearly the difference between the counterrevolution and a policy of sop. While achieving the social reformation, we find our measures regarded and we are half inclined to regard them ourselves-as a series of bribes to a menacing proletariat, extorted from the fears of a plutocracy struggling to maintain itself in power, rather than

as what they are, a

reversion to the natural principles of the Tory party, which were only obscured in 1832, when the nation was captured by Liberalism, and when Conservatism was invented to save the face of the older members of the party, who-convinced against their will, and doing violence to their instincts, which would have led them better than they knew-conformed, in appearance, to the main Liberal principles, reserving only a saving reluctance to put them into practice. The time has come for a return, consciously as well as in practice, to the principles of active Toryism. only is a policy of vote-catching, always and under all circumstances, the worst of all means for catching votes, but it saps, as Lord Lytton said in 1875, the very vitals of the party itself. A vote-catching measure which loses a Tory may gain a Liberal. Yes; but for that measure only. The friend will be lost for ever: the enemy gained but for a single night.

For not

Toryism in its essence, or Toryism properly so called, is less a philosophy than a frame of the Anglo-Saxon mindwhich is perhaps the reason why it has never been analysed. No Oriental could be a Tory if he tried, though Solomon had a firm grasp of its principles. Nor could a Hellene, though there is much sound doctrine in Aristotle; nor a Roman, though the best Romans may remind you of our Parliament in the days of Pitt. The French aristocrat, even of the old French, was as foreign to the true Tory spirit as the

agrarian junker himself. The Celt, of all times and conditions, is out of court, as an incarnate protest against the nature of things; for the nature of things is precisely what the Tory accepts. You shall not find the doctrine set forth in Bolingbroke, though he was the first Tory leader; nor in Disraeli, though he would have revived a spirit of which he was himself incapable. It is not, as Cardinal Newman and others have vainly imagined, a loyalty to persons; but rather, on the precise contrary, a loyalty to institutions. All political parties, no doubt, as Ruskin complains, resolve themselves, in a sense, into two: that which holds, with Solomon, that a rod is for the fool's back; and that which holds, with the fool himself, that a crown is for his head, a vote for his mouth, and all the universe for his belly. Yet the Tory, though he objects to folly, will no more rest satisfied with the most efficient of bureaucracies than with a paternal despotism. Again, this faith (or frame of mind) is no prerogative of the landed classes though the landed classes, by force of their traditions and duties, are its natural custodians and exponents. Two great antagonistic principles, says Croker, lie at the root of all Governments— stability and experiment. "The former is Tory, and the latter Whig; and the human mind divides itself into these classes as inevitably as between indolence and activity, obstinacy and indecision, temerity and versatility," and the other an

There

tinomies inherent in human nature. But Toryism is not a love merely of repose, nor of law and order, to the exclusion of progress; nor a devotion to Bagehot's "legality," to the exclusion of "variability." Croker was as far from comprehending his party as Cardinal Newman and the rest. A review of the history of parties will lead the hasty observer to confusion. Toryism is the national as well as the popular party; yet it is not to be identified, because of the Jingoes, with an aggressive foreign policy, any more than, because of Eldon and his comates, with a harsh repression of the masses at home. have been Tory peace Ministers since the age of Anne, as well as Whig Cabinets which were all for war. Pitt was for trade and peace; Liverpool, Peel, Aberdeen, were only too pacific; Palmerston was a Liberal, with the Whig tradition. It is in the word national that we get our first hint for a definition. The oldest Toryism was an expression of nationalism, a protest of the nation, under the leadership of the older gentry, against the dominance of the Whigs. Whiggery was a family conspiracy for place, a sort of oligarchical Plan of Campaign, pursued by a social caste, founded originally on the confiscation of Church lands, which settled its hold on its possessions in the Great Rebellion, seized control of the State at the Revolution, and used the cant of a democratic philosophy ----which resulted, abroad, in the establishment of the republics of France and America-to cover

an attempt to put the English Crown into commission, and to convert the king into a Doge. But the the creed the Whigs adopted represented, after all, one aspect of eternal political truth, and it fundamentally, though insensibly, modified their ambitions. They had found it to their interest to profess a special devotion to progress: and progress made them its apostles malgré eux-mêmes. The balance was struck between two parties, each of which represented thenceforward one side of the basal antinomy existing in every English mind; and Whiggery, or the successive substitutes therefor which inherited its traditions, became, as the perennial Opposition, an essential factor in the British constitution a constitution which is not written, and which it is unnecessary to reduce to writing, because it has a psychological basis in the individual citizen. And if it be objected that the Opposition is not an Opposition, when it is in power, that is not to the point. The Whigs, Liberals, Radicals, and Home Rulers of the past; the inchoate congeries of fad-mongers of the present; and their Socialistic or other successors of the future, are all alike, on whichever benches their leaders may sit, in Opposition, in the sense in which the devil, as the first revolutionary and the first critic, was the first Whig. They represent the solvent, decomposing acid in the body politic, in opposition to Toryism, to the national spirit, to the party the party which conserves the unity and the