ing household suffrage, can it be doubted that a split in the Cabinet would have been the immediate consequence? What then? We should have probably had Lord Russell and Mr Gladstone back in power, pledged to disfranchise entirely where they had previously proposed to group, creating new constituencies in large towns, and swamping counties altogether, by letting loose upon them all the copyholders and leaseholders resident within boroughs. Besides, how long would the £7 or £6 or £5 qualifications have been allowed to stand? The sole choice, therefore, submitted to Lord Derby was, whether he would give such a Bill as we have actually got, or hand over the country to be Americanised by a party which has shown that anything was in their opinion to be preferred to the loss of office for themselves and their friends. Well, but can we excuse the shifts to which Lord Derby and Mr Disraeli had recourse ?-their attempt to bring on a Reform Bill by resolution of the House? their proposal to guard against the extinction of the rights of property by giving to certain classes of voters dual votes? What can be said for these, and for the final abandonment of the clause which restricted compound householders from voting at all? With respect to the last of these points it may suffice to observe, that the necessity for a qualification of the personal payment of rates is just as securely guarded by the law as it stands, as it would have been had the original proposal of the Minister been carried. The individual desirous to exercise the privilege of the franchise must enter his name on the rate-book, and pay the rates direct, or through his landlord, as he may prefer. The question of dual voting Mr Disraeli shall dispose of for himself : : "Well, there is the principle of plural voting. The Tory party would never have permitted the introduction of your Bill if they had known you were going to give up the principle of plural voting. Well, the principle of plural voting was introduced into the Resolutions; and if we had had a fair and good discussion on the principle of plural voting, which we had not, I think it might have been advantageous to the House of Commons and instructive to the country. But, is not a Tory principle. No Tory ever gentlemen, the principle of plural voting wrote in favour of plural voting. No Tory ever made a speech in favour of plural voting; but after Lord John Russell, by that fatal act of faction in 1859, pledged Parliament and the country to a reduction of the franchise, there was an immense alarm in the Liberal party on the possible consequences of such a course, and all the philosophers who belonged to the Liberal party, and I have reason to believe there are some in the city of Edinburgh, wrote books to show that they could only save the State by allowing men to have more votes than one. Well, there is no doubt the men who did this were philosophers -all very clever men- Mr Mill and his disciples - men of great brain, of great intelligence, many of them, and, like him, masters of composition; and no doubt they produced a certain effect on the public mind. Not that the great mass of the people had ever heard of such a thing, but these things affected the public mind among the more intelligent and influential classes, and therefore, in our Resolutions, knowing very well that if a Tory could have more than one vote he would have no objection to it, although he never invented the system, we introduced the principle of plural voting in our Bill, and we are denounced by great authorities because we introduced our measure with the re commendation of plural voting, and then gave up that great security in a moment. Now, what are the facts of the case? When I introduced the Bill, I referred to the circumstances I have just noticed, and said we had proposed there should be in certain circumstances a dual vote. I did not particularly insist on it, but wished to have the opinion of the House upon it. What happened next night? A county member-a highly Conservative meniber, I am sorry to say, although he is a very old friend of mine, not now present, for he was a Scotch member-the member for Invernessgave notice of a motion denouncing plural voting under any forms and circum stances. That was the first welcome of Mr the principle of plural voting. Henley, a remarkable man, to whom the Chairman has referred - probably his like has not been seen in the House of Commons since the Parliaments of Walpole and the days of Mr Shippen wrote a letter to the Government, and made a speech in the House of Commons, in which he denounced plural voting; and all, and they are many, who are influenced by Mr Henley, would have acted with him. All that I know is, that I fixed one fortnight before the second reading of the Bill; and before a week had elapsed, those who had the best knowledge of our party-the gentlemen who assist me by their acuteness and universal acquaintance with the members-informed me they did not believe there were ten men in the Tory party who would vote in favour of plural voting. Mr Gladstone one week after announcing his implacable hostility to plural voting-of course, it was universally said that I immediately truckled to Mr Gladstone. The fact is, the party would not stand plural voting. They did not sympathise with the Liberal philosophers, and I was obliged to give Would you not have done so in it up. the same circumstances?" It appears then, to us, that in libelling the public and private character of the two great leaders of the Tory party, the writer in the Quarterly Review' convicts himself not of gross ignorance only, but of something more to be lamented than ignorance. There is a bitterness in his style for which we can find no excuse, unless it be such as angry men usually offer when "temper has run away with them." Mr Disraeli, we perceive, accepts this excuse. "I would say that article was written by a very clever man who has made a great mistake. It is a combination which, it is said, produces strange effects on the temper and sometimes on the intellect." This is well put, but we doubt whether the Conservative party will so lightly pass by a piece of ratiocination, which, if it prove anything, proves them to be blockheads of the first water. Not only have they allowed themselves to be duped into ruining their own VOL. CII.-NO. DCXXVI. cause and blasting their own reputation, but so blind are they, and so besotted, that they cannot even now discover how entirely they are befooled. They meet by thousands in all parts of the country to profess their undiminished confidence in the men who have betrayed them, and rejoice as people are supposed to do only when things go well with them. All this may be a delusion, but it is a delusion the like of which was was never before heard of; for it throws its glamour over others than the avowed professors of Conservative opinions. There was a time, and that not very long ago, when the proposal to feast Lord Derby in Manchester and Mr Disraeli in Edinburgh would have thrown both cities into a ferment. Conceive such an idea entertained in Manchester during the dominance of the Anti-CornLaw League, or just after Mr Gladstone had, in the spring of 1866, been venting his spleen in Lancashire at the treatment which the Whig Reform Bill had met with. Conceive such an idea entertained in Edinburgh any time between Lord Chancellor Brougham's reception there and the general election which sent Mr Black into private life, and delegated Mr M'Laren to represent the capital of Scotland in the House of Commons. Now Manchester and Edinburgh have given Nor the one to the First Lord of the Treasury, the other to the Chancellor of the Exchequer-such a greeting as in the memory of the present generation no public man ever before received in either city. is it exclusively among the upper and middle classes of society that these gentlemen find their admirers. The dinners in the Free-Trade Hall at Manchester, and in the Corn Exchange at Edinburgh, were both brilliant in the extreme. Men of every rank and station, from the duke to the private gentleman, gathered by hundreds round the well-spread boards, and the reception awarded to the guest on 3 F either occasion was all that the heart of man could desire. But even more significative of the sense of the nation was the anxiety displayed by the working men of Lancashire and Scotland to meet the chiefs of the Tory party, and to thank them for the good work which they had achieved. Unfortunately for himself, and much to the regret of the men of Manchester, the state of Lord Derby's health would not allow him to gratify his admirers in this respect. It was different with Mr Disraeli; and this we will take it upon us to assert, that by none who listened to it when spoken, nor by many who read the substance of it in the newspapers next day, will his address delivered in the Music Hall on the evening of the 30th of October 1867 be speedily forgotten. Upwards of two thousand persons, almost all of them working men, put into his hands an address as manly as it is eloquent, and were replied to in a tone which at once won their hearts and satisfied their sober judgment. Nor did the demonstration end where it began. The working men of London have since met at the Crystal Palace to express their satisfaction at the passing of the Tory Reform Bill, and their confidence in the authors of that measure. They were well addressed by Lord John Manners, and well understood and appreciated his speech. We shall probably, after all this, hear less than we used to do of the natural antagonism of the Tory party to the working-classes. The Quarterly Review' itself will scarcely, we should think, take courage to write again about sudden conversions and a lifelong policy reversed. In like manner, insinuations about subtlety and craft, which it is so easy to throw out and so hard to verify, find their own level when tried by the touchstone of fact. 6 "Believe me," said Mr Disraeli, speaking to the working-men of Edinburgh, "that I am not entitled to those compli ments which I sometimes receive upon my marvellous dexterity. I will explain to you to-night all the arts by which I contrived to achieve this great success. All the black arts imputed to me are simply these that on all important questions I took my own party into confidence, and that when I had to appeal to an independent Opposition, I remembered at all times that they were men of sense and gentlemen. And it was by these ceeded at last, as the organ of a unanimtwo means, and these only, that I sucous Government, in carrying a measure which I believe will add stability to the State, and spirit to the community." So also, at the Crystal Palace, Lord John Manners explained clearly and at length what the links are which connect the Tory party with the working-men, and how steadily and consistently the former have, by their votes in Parliament, laboured, through good report and through evil, to get justice done to the latter. Is it becoming, is it commonly decent, for a writer, calling himself a Tory, in the face of all this, to sound an alarm of which the sole effect can be-if it have any effect to intimidate the friends of order as much as it encourages revolutionists? What right has the essayist whose article we are now criticising, to assert that "Lord Derby does not pay the homage of hypocrisy to the virtues he is renouncing"? What justification can he offer for affirming that, "when summoned to power, his (Lord Derby's) ambition was not to struggle for the Conservative principles which he had, up to that moment, advocated, or to fall in the attempt. He did not welcome the opportunity of showing the sincerity of his Opposition professions by his practice when in office. The simple standard which he proposed to himself to reach was to bring forward such a measure as would save himself from being ousted from office, and would convert the majority of his opponents into a minority"? Is it virtue in a public man called to the guidance of public affairs to take up in times like these a position which he knows to be untenable, to advocate a policy which the country and the Parliament had alike rejected, instead of striking out some new device, which might afford at least a chance of saving the Constitution from shipwreck ? Are Conservative principles synonymous with sheer obstinacy- the determination not to move a hair's-breadth from a constitutional settlement which has been thrown over by the authors of it? Or would the Quarterly Reviewer be content had Lord Derby put himself at the head of those bit-by-bit Reformers, the necessary consequence of whose legislation, if not its avowed object, is to keep the public mind in a state of chronic agitation? A leap in the dark! Well, be it so. Surely it is better to take a leap in the dark, knowing, at all events, beforehand where we expect to land, than to find ourselves pushed down from one slippery crag to another, till our very brain becomes confused, and courage and strength to hold on anywhere alike forsake us. But this is idle verbiage. The business of all lovers of their country now is not with the past, but with the future. What is done cannot be undone; and this much at least her Majesty's Ministers are justified in saying for themselves, that, whether right or wrong in the course which they believed themselves constrained to take, they have carried the great bulk of the party with them. It may be that in the throng of their followers some may be found who would rather that events had turned out differently. This is quite possible; and so long as the sense of regret operates only like any other private sorrow, making them graver and more anxious than they would have otherwise been, the most rigid of partisans can have no right to find fault. But he who, swayed by private pique, does his best to render good government under any set of Ministers impossible, deserves no pity. Now, with this grave crime against his country-rather than against his party-we charge the writer in the Quarterly Review ;' and our worst wish concerning him is that he may sooner or later discover where his great mistake lies, and yet do his best to atone for it. INDEX TO VOL. CII. Aberdeen Ministry, the, 248. Agriculture, state of, on the accession Albano, the cholera in, 454 et seq. Augustin, St, failure of his mission Aurora Floyd, notice of, 263. Austria, the war between, and France, Authors as conversationists, on, 558. Alcoholic liquors, duty imposed on, in Avalanches, various kinds of, 541. the States, 31. ALISON, SIR ARCHIBALD, THE DEATH of, Allen's Independence of Scotland, 309. during the cholera there, 459, 460. Americanisms, examples of, 401, 403 et seq. Anglo-Saxon Church, origin and early history of the, 703 et seq. Arms, contracts for, in the States dur- Army, Sir C. Wood's measures regard- Art, state of, at the accession of George Aschaffenburg, effect of the war on, Atoms, theories of, 289. Attwood, T., his works on the supre- Barry, the portraits of, 603. Bavaria, officials on railways of, 424, Beard, an American contractor, 28. Beesley, Professor, his defence of the Union outrages, 251, 498. Bell, Miss Hannah, Sunday schools be- Bell-ringing, superstitions connected Berchtesgaden, sketches at, 434, 435- BILL AS IT IS, THE, 245. Boughton, Mr, Early Puritans of New Bounties, system of, in the United British tourist, the, 551 et seq. - BROWNLOWS-Part VII., 1-Part VIII., |