once forthcoming. A good thing for everybody to wear round. his neck to avoid the evil glance is a three-cornered amulet, containing salt, charcoal, and garlic, which the mother binds around her infant's neck, and as she does so must mutter: 'salt and garlic be in the eyes of our enemies ;' but when their boys are grown up and affect to be ashamed of such things, it is curious to watch the anxious wives and mothers seize a surreptitious moment for tying up a piece of salt in a corner of the sceptic's handkerchief, that the evil eye may be averted, and all manner of pains in the stomach. For with them the seat of the spirit is supposed to be the stomach; sometimes you may hear the stomach called you, and in Byzantine wall-paintings we see the devil dragging the spirit out of the mouth; hence anything that affects the spirit like the evil eye is supposed to produced a stomach-ache.

Thus the priest and the old women have joint jurisdiction over some diseases, but over childbirth the old women reign supreme; the old woman it is who knows where to find the 'male flower,' that mysterious herb which grows on the mountain-side, and which has power to avert that dreadful calamity to a household, namely, the birth of a daughter; she it is who knows where to cut the olive-branch which, from its shape, is like unto the Virgin's hand, and which the mother must hold in her hand as she brings forth; and she takes a malicious pleasure in keeping her rival, the priest, out of the house as long as she can, and then only admits him to give the blessing. All the horrible medicaments and strange customs are on this occasion administered by the old women; the priests are not initiated into these mysteries.

These old women answer distinctly to the race which we call witches, and they have influence over more things than diseases. A witch will wrap up, they tell you, eggs in her hair for forty days, after which they are hatched, if she does not leave her house for that space of time. These birds fly out at night, and on whosesoever house they perch the cows give no milk, and the milk is transferred to the udders of those cows the witch wishes to give plenty. Such are the medical practitioners into whose hands the Greek islander entrusts his most anxious cases. Even consumption, by no means a common disease amongst them, is treated by the old women amongst the peasants; and if a doctor does exist in the island, his practice is confined to the better educated and upper class. Consumption is said to be an Erinys which has seized on the individual, an Erinys being, according to their notion, a species of worm, numbers of which are sent out by God for the punishment of wicked men; hence

these good people have arrived at the bacilli theory long before the learned medicine men of Western Europe. When a consumptive patient dies, they say that there are four Erinyes at each corner of the room, ready to pounce on the survivors; hence consumption is to them a highly infectious disease, and at the last moment all young children are hurriedly sent out of the room, or rather out of doors, as is usually the case, and a hole is made in the ceiling just over the head of the expiring individual, so that the four Erinyes may escape as soon as the sufferer has given up the ghost.

Cholera, they say, is an old man who lives in a vast cave; and he has been seen there frequently by benighted shepherds sitting with a row of lamps before him, and whenever he extinguishes one of them, somebody dies of cholera. There are, of course, innumereble diseases and innumerable cures amongst the islands; the sores on the legs which come from fasting and poor living are commonly reputed to come from washing on the first six days of August, until the candle of the Transfiguration is lit;' in like manner if linen is washed in these days, the result is that holes come in it. An Andriote schoolmaster invented a theory that during the early days of August microscopic animalcula settle on anything damp; at all events, these sores Drymes, as they are called, are common enough whatever may be the cause of them.

Again, even in their leave-takings they have a ceremony which we see depicted on vase-paintings. Hector, when he takes leave of his mother, spilt water on the ground out of a bowl, and this is done still; and a well-known ceremony in the islands, from which the men often go away for years in search of work, attends the departure. All the traveller's friends and relatives meet at the house, and as he goes out of the threshold of his home, one of the household pours out of a glass a libation of water, which is supposed to ensure for him abundance and success during the time of his absence. If he has a wife, she is supposed to remain in mourning; all ornaments are put away until his return.

ART. IX.-I. Speech of Lord Hartington at Nelson, Oct. 31, 1885.

2. Speech of Lord Hartington at Accrington, Dec. 2, 1883. 3. Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Introduction of the Land Bill, April 16th, 1886.

4. Public Opinion and Lord Beaconsfield. 2 vols. London,

1886.

5. History of Toryism, from the Accession of Mr. Pitt to power in 1783, to the death of Lord Beaconsfield in 1881. By T. E. Kebbel. London, 1885.

T may, we think, be taken for granted, that one effect of the great political crisis, on which we entered with the current year, has been to force a large number of persons who had previously stood aloof from politics to regard for the first time with considerate attention the working of that Parliamentary machine, by which the Government of this country has been so long and, on the whole, so successfully directed. At first they would probably wonder that it could ever have succeeded at all, and that a system by which the Empire had been brought to the very verge of ruin before statesmen could be roused to discriminate between their major and their minor obligations, should have been tolerated for a day by a nation which prides itself on its knowledge of the art of government; or that such a system should be extolled to the skies as the most admirable contrivance for its purpose which the wit of man could have invented. Further reflection would doubtless correct this hasty judgment; and so far from seeing anything surprising or extraordinary in the freedom of language, which has recently been used in reference to the subject by the public writers of the day, such inexperienced persons would regard it as perfectly natural, and precisely what might have been expected. To others, however-to all, that is, who have grown old in political affairs, and are familiar with the tone in which they are commonly discussed-such comments will seem as startling as they are novel; indicating, as they do, that long cherished theories have suddenly undergone a great shock; that new ideas and new conceptions are creeping into our received code of politics; and that doubts and suggestions, which would at one time have been treated with contempt by those who take a practical view of public matters, have now been admitted within the region of debatable questions which political common-sense need no longer hesitate to recognize.

The new tone, the doubts and suggestions, to which we here refer, relate to the method of Party government, which has

prevailed in this country since the accession of George I., and which has accommodated itself to so many different phases of Parliamentary government in the past, that there is nothing unreasonable in supposing that it will continue to flourish in the future. But as the changes, which Party governnient may be called on to encounter, will not necessarily be the same as those which it has hitherto survived, and even to the latter it has only adapted itself with difficulty-we are not among those who regard its position as secured. We are far from implying that the Party system is necessarily breaking up. But it certainly exhibits symptoms which should cause its adherents some anxiety. These symptoms may denote only a passing disorder, or they may indicate decay of vital power. What we now see and hear may point either to the dissolution of present arrangements, and the introduction of others better adapted to. the divisions of opinion which prevail in the nation at large, or it may presage the disappearance of the system as a useless and mischievous anachronism; and we should do well to prepare ourselves for either alternative. The following remarks may perhaps help to elucidate a question which, as it is peculiarly susceptible of confusion, is also very easily converted into an instrument of mystification by those who find their account in throwing dust into the public eye.

Party has, by many great statesmen, been considered only an accident, not an essential, of our English form of government. Lord Bolingbroke so considered it as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his speech on the Land Bill, reminded us. Parties, he thought, ought to have expired at the Revolution, and would have done so, had not the Hanoverian Government artificially prolonged them. That, from Lord Bolingbroke's point of view, was done then, which many persons would say is being done now: the Party system was kept alive to serve a particular interest, when it no longer represented real differences of opinion. The difference of opinion which existed before 1688 as to the comparative dangers of a Popish Sovereign on the one hand, and a disputed succession on the other, was a real difference; and so long as these alternatives were offered to us, the division of the country into two parties was a natural and healthy one. But with the final expulsion of the Stuarts the controversy was really closed; and that it was reopened, although in a different form, was the doing of the Whigs themselves. During the reigns of William and Queen Anne, Whigs and Tories were employed indiscriminately by the Sovereign ; and it was not till the accession of George J. that, at the instigation of the leading Whigs, a policy of proscription was adopted,

which inevitably threw the Tory Party into the form of a regular Opposition. This was Bolingbroke's version of the second Act of the Revolution. The exclusion of so many able men, not really disaffected to the new dynasty, from every place of trust or dignity in the kingdom, led once more to the formation of a Court and Country Party, which, but for this impolitic mistake, reed never have existed.

It was impossible for the Tory Party always to avoid the appearance of acting in concert with the Jacobites the small remnant who would have restored the Stuarts at all hazards. But the Tories were not Jacobites; though, as Lord Shelburne points out, it was the interest of the Whigs to have them thought so; and to represent them to be as hostile as the Jacobites to the Protestant succession.* This, however, was not true; and as the Church of England knew that she had no better friends than the Tory country gentlemen, whom she supported on all occasions, the Whigs called in the Dissenters to aid them against the influence of the clergy, and the power of the moneyed interest to help them against the landlords. Bolingbroke's account of the matter is to be received with caution, as some of the points, enumerated by Shelburne, of difference between the Whigs and Tories, existed both before and after the Revolution. But what he seems to mean is this, that had not the unwise policy of the new Administration invested them with fresh significance, these points of difference need not have laid the foundation of Party government.

During the years that followed Walpole's death, under the peaceful administration of Pelham and the glorious administration of Chatham, Party almost died away. But with the accession of George III., an event which at first sight seemed likely to complete its destruction, it woke up again to new life. All fear of the Stuarts having vanished from men's minds, the Whigs no longer found it answer to accuse their opponents of Jacobitism. To Monarchy, in the abstract, the nation was cordially attached; and when the young King began to chafe under the ascendency of a Party, which claimed not only an

*There were,' says Lord Shelburne, 'during the first twenty years of the reign of George II., three parties: first, the old Whigs who entirely composed the Administration; secondly the discontented Whigs, who one after another quarrelled with Sir Robert Walpole and the main body; thirdly, the Tories, to whose character and principles sufficient justice has not been done owing to the never-ceasing out-cry of the Ministers in confounding them with the Jacobites, but, in fact, they were the landed interest of England who desired to see an honourable, dignified government, conducted with order and due economy, and due subordination, in opposition to the Whigs, who courted the mob in the first instance, and in the next the commercial interest.'-' Life of Lord Shelburne, by Lord Edmund FitzMaurice, vol. i. p. 49.