The arduous study, by which alone a statesman can keep abreast even with the progress of the most important public question is a toil, compared to which attendance in Parliament is repose. Yet without this toil no Prime Minister can hold an unquestioned supremacy over his colleagues. No man can be master of those who act under him, if his knowledge of the subject-matter of their labours is palpably inferior to theirs. For two or three years past it has been painfully apparent that Lord Palmerston no longer possessed any effective control over his colleagues. The acts of the Government have borne upon them little trace either of the old spirit or the old sagacity. It is difficult to conceive that Mr. Gladstone would have been permitted to utter a manifesto in favour of manhood suffrage, if Lord Palmerston had been really master in his own Ministry. It is still more difficult to imagine that if the despatches of the Foreign Office had passed under Lord Palmerston's eye, those ambiguous and insincere intimations of support would have been made which betrayed the Danes to their ruin. But all this administrative neglect mattered little, so long as the Prime Minister was able to keep up his punctual attendance at the House of Commons. It was not difficult for a veteran debater to gloze over even the most serious blunders, or, at all events, to conceal the fact that they were due, not to errors in his judgment, but to an inevitable laxity of supervision. But now that the Prime Minister is no longer able to take his regular place during the sittings of the House, even the pretence of efficiency is gone.

That Lord Palmerston, during the years of life which, we trust, are still in store for him, may by his counsel render great service to his country no one will deny. But it will be in some field of action less laborious than the office of Prime Minister and leader of the House of Commons. In other words, it is not in any case a contingency to be accepted as lying within the limits of probability, that he should long retain even the nominal guidance of the policy of the country. Any political action, therefore, based upon the assumption that he will continue at the head of the Liberal party, and that any power entrusted to their hands would be exercised under his guidance, rests upon a mere delusion. Now, public opinion has always drawn a very broad distinction between Lord Palmerston and his colleagues. Rightly or wrongly, he has been a universal favourite. His long experience, his great services, his popular manners, have all combined to recommend him to his countrymen: and he has enjoyed in consequence a popularity which has scarcely ever been equalled in recent times, except in the case of men who have won it by

military

military achievements. Not the least curious part of this feeling has been that it has been cherished perhaps more strongly among his professed opponents than among his friends. A belief that, in his heart, he was a sincere Conservative-or, as Sir James Graham used to phrase it, the greatest Tory in the House'— and that his position as Liberal leader conferred upon him a power of giving effect to those opinions which, in any other position, he would not have enjoyed, naturally entitled him to the regard of the mass of the Conservative party. They forgave the laxity of the morality in the benefits of the results, especially at a time when Democracy seemed rather nearer at hand than it does now.

The disinclination to oppose Lord Palmerston, so long as he was in his vigour, was very strong both among members themselves and among their constituents. It is only since it has become evident that his name and popularity were being used to mask the designs of far less trustworthy politicians that any opposition in earnest to his Government has commenced. But this popularity is far from being extended to his colleagues : least of all among the political opponents of the Government. No one suspects either Lord Russell or Mr. Gladstone of being animated by a secret Conservatism. Whenever the whole power of the Government shall fall into their hands, the battle for the Constitution will be hard and serious work. Lord Palmerston, though he can do little to govern them, is still able to obstruct them. He may not be able to go very deeply into business, or watch over the development of a policy. He cannot do much to prevent his subordinates from giving an indirect assistance to the Radicals; but no important measure of Government can be introduced without his consent; and he still is able to put his veto upon them if they directly aim at any object which he has been accustomed to dislike. But when he has retired, as he inevitably must do in the course of a few months, this restraint will be wholly removed; and a Liberal Government under his successor will be something very different from what it has been during the last six years.

There can be no doubt that the general feeling of the country is strongly Conservative. People in England do not reason much upon abstract ideas: they are rather apt to treat political changes that may be offered by a theorist as a sensible person treats a horse that is offered him by a horse-dealer. They like to see them tried before they take them. The democratic organs have made many attempts to persuade them that democracy has been brilliantly successful in producing liberty wherever it has been tried, and especially in France and America. But they

have not succeeded in inspiring a perfect satisfaction with the result of these two experiments. Liberty, as it exists at Paris and in Washington, may be a very admirable thing; but those who have been accustomed to the home-grown article cannot help liking it better. A Londoner accustomed to live under the oppression which, we are told, the aristocracy inflict upon the people in England, would feel himself ill at ease in the perfect liberty which is offered to him by the sovereign people in those two capitals. In consequence of these national prejudices, a strong reaction against democracy has been setting in for the last thirteen years. It was set in action by the result of the French attempt; and its course has been quickened and strengthened by the close to which the more vaunted experiment in America has come. Some organs of the Government have amused themselves with proving that there has been no Conservative reaction at all, because it has not had the effect of unseating the Government. Lord Palmerston has taken the most effectual precautions that no such melancholy catastrophe should happen. The stream has not submerged the vessel, because the vessel floated with the stream. The Ministry have not been overthrown by the Conservative reaction, because they have not been wholly strangers to its influence. That Mr. Gladstone has not forced his chief to bring in a Reform Bill is the best proof that can be had of the strength of the Conservative feeling that animates the country. It is this Conservative feeling which makes the advocates of the Administration so anxious to press the name of Lord Palmerston upon the attention of the electors, and to confine their attention rather to the past than to the future.

It is very little to the purpose to tell the electors of what Lord Palmerston has done during his tenure of office. Be it good or bad, he will not be there to do it again. The unanimous consent of all the constituencies in the three kingdoms could not make him Prime Minister for six years more. Votes given to a Liberal candidate, who professes to be a supporter of Lord Palmerston, will not operate to keep Lord Palmerston in office, or to secure the continuance of the policy he has pursued. He was a minister of a special type, whose mantle can descend to no successor. Certainly that successor will not be found in Mr. Gladstone or Lord Russell, who both helped to drive him from office the year before they took their places under him. Yet it will be for such a successor that electors who are deluded into going to the hustings to support Lord Palmerston will be really voting. If a majority is obtained for the Liberals, it is probable that the new Parliament will be as long-lived as the last. During the six years that it may last, the votes given for Lord Palmerston at this election

will continue to be operative and cannot be recalled. It is scarcely possible that his tenure of office can survive the first year of the new Parliament's existence. In all probability he will not meet it at all. The members that were elected to support him will remain in Parliament bound to the Liberal party and to whatever leader fortune shall select as Lord Palmerston's successor. In counties, especially where his name is likely to be appealed to, it behoves the electors to consider what the real effect will be of votes given nominally to one who is no longer practically a candidate for power.

In the present state of the Liberal party, it is no easy task to forecast the name of the leader who will take Lord Palmerston's place. If talent alone were to decide the choice, no doubt could be entertained, for Mr. Gladstone is without a peer. But talent alone is not sufficient to secure to him the unquestioned authority wielded by Lord Palmerston. The Whigs have never taken kindly to their distinguished convert. He was not born in the purple, nor do any ties of blood or marriage draw him within the sacred caste from among whom their leaders are traditionally taken. There are other objections of a more substantial kind. He is in earnest about Reform, which is a very unwholesome and unnatural frame of mind for one who aspires in these days to lead the great Whig party. He is one of those awkward men who will take pledges upon such subjects literally, and argues that, because his party have loudly professed the desirability of Reform, therefore a Reform Bill ought to be brought in. No Whig following such a leader can feel safe for a single moment. He never knows, when he pledges himself to a 'safe and satisfactory measure of Reform' in the usual style, that he will not wake up some morning and find that he has been taken at his word. At the same time he is almost as dangerous to discard as to follow. He commands the undivided affections of the Radical section of the party. He has been the first statesman for many years past-perhaps the first they have ever hadwho has been even a possible candidate for Prime Minister. They sympathise with him very closely upon questions of finance; and Church matters, which form the only point of difference between them now, are not likely to keep them very long apart. A time may come when his refined and subtle intellect may find their rough and ready dogmatism intolerable, and he may break away from that as he has from every other alliance he has ever formed. But for the present there is no sign of discord between them. Their affection for him has been steadily growing ever since 1860, and no indication of its abatement has yet become visible. With backers so powerful, and at present so staunch, Vol. 118.-No. 235.

U

Mr.

Mr. Gladstone is a candidate for power whom it would be dangerous, if not fatal, to offend. If he is slighted by the offer of a position inferior to that which he thinks himself entitled to hold, it is in his power to split up his party to the very base.

A Radical secession would give a palpable form to that irreconcilable antagonism of opinion which separates the Democrat from the Constitutional Whig, and which even now is a cause of inextricable embarrassment to the party at many a borough election. These serious consequences would almost certainly follow, if the Whigs refused to take Mr. Gladstone for their leader in the House of Commons; and there is no other man upon the Treasury bench sufficiently popular, or sufficiently qualified, for the post to induce them to incur any risk of breaking up their party on his account. It may be assumed that, whatever their feelings may be, the command, as soon as it drops from the hands of the present venerable leader, will pass without any open demur into the hands of Mr. Gladstone. Whether he will be Prime Minister or not, does not of course depend wholly upon the House of Commons; but there can be little doubt that, if the present Government obtain a majority, the leadership of the House of Commons, involving the substantial control of the policy of the country, will devolve upon him.

If that be so, the future policy of the Liberal party will not be difficult to forecast. The measures which Parliament will be called upon to pass, if the electors should be deluded, by the use of Lord Palmerston's name, into returning a Liberal majority, will be those to which Mr. Gladstone has pledged himself. They are by this time tolerably well-known. Upon his views in regard to the Church of England we have spoken elsewhere. They are at present in a state of transition, and cannot be described with perfect accuracy. Upon the rights of the Irish Church, they have arrived at more maturity. He has expressed his opinions upon this subject with a frankness that will preclude him from receding from them at any future period. He holds that the property of the Irish Church, held as it is by an undisturbed title of three hundred years, is yet unreservedly at the disposal of Parliament, to do with it what it thinks best, and that Parliament ought to exercise that power in favour of the religion of the majority of the people. We may look, therefore, upon a formal agitation for the spoliation of the Irish Church as one of the most certain results of Mr. Gladstone's leadership.

Upon finance, perhaps, there does not remain much alteration that he can make. In the middle of all his remissions he has uniformly refused to concede the only financial changes by which the agricultural interest can be benefited. He still appears to

cherish