it coolly turned adrift. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues were willing to be the heroes of the famous Appropriation Clause, but, as to becoming its martyrs, that was a totally different affair. Their best friends admit that they adhered to place with an undue tenacity; and we cannot question the truth of the charge against them of dallying with Radicalism, since Lord Grey (then Lord Howick) found it necessary on quitting office in 1839 to Nor can even friends, we should think, make the accusation. admire the manner in which they raised the great controversy of Protection in 1841. Legislation upon corn, sugar, and timber may have deserved their attention; these, however, were questions which common decency required them to approach as questions of the first order, with full deliberation and full notice. Instead of this, the Queen's Speech at the opening of the Session proved by its silence that no such plans were intended: and it was only when the accumulation of Parliamentary defeats absolutely compelled them to choose between resignation and a policy, that they announced their intention to modify the Protective system. They had weathered seven Sessions of Parliament; during this, their legislative life, they had made no step worth naming in the direction of commercial freedom: on their deathbeds they executed a charitable bequest in its favour, which the world took to be rather like some other charitable bequests, made under like circumstances, a wrong and an embarrassment to their successors much more than a testimony of disinterested and self-denying affection. But with all this the Melbourne Government, like Lord Grey's which preceded it, and Sir Robert Peel's which followed it, has left its mark upon our history. Many laws of the utmost importance are due to its labours: the Municipal Corporation Acts in the three countries, the Church Commission Acts, the Marriage and Registration Acts, the laws for the Commutation of Tithes in England and Ireland, the Irish Poor Law, the extension of the arrangements for public aid to popular Education, the introduction of the Penny Postage (although under financial arrangements which were singularly discreditable): these, if we name no others, form no trivial monument to an English Administration. On the particular merits or defects of these measures we have no intention of entering: as they remain upon the statute book, and have struck root in the country, we must recognise them as being, upon the whole, apart from all individual or party views, a fair representation of the national mind, and an adequate product of its legislative organ. In one subject, however, the Government of A fatality appears Lord Melbourne left a wretched name. evermore to dog the path of Whig finance, and never was it in

worse

worse esteem than under the management of Lord Melbourne's ministry.

At the time when Sir Robert Peel's Government was driven from office in 1846, it might upon the whole be justly said, that for a quarter of a century or more the work of legislation for the United Kingdom had been vigorously carried on. The business of administration, which is the primary function of the Executive Government, subject only to the after control and correction of Parliament, had, we believe, during the same period, been very creditably conducted. The organisation of departments, the scale and methods of public remuneration, the management of the public accounts, all had undergone extended inquiries and improvements. The colonial policy of the country had passed into a new, and, as it is now universally allowed, a most beneficial phase and although the Foreign Department was of necessity less than others subject to effective Parliamentary review, yet in this respect too the agency of Parliament had been often important, and never otherwise than creditable. With all this the condition of the people had undergone a marked improvement, and general content among the masses (in which we must, we fear, recognise the best modern substitute for the ancient sentiment of popular loyalty) had taken the place of a sullen and restless estrangement. Thus the Legislature had really and vigorously addressed itself to the work of dealing with the arrears which a century had accumulated, and its general success was attested by the growing prosperity of the people, and by the public approval of its labours.

Now all this was achieved under a system of party government: a system much maligned, much misunderstood, open no doubt to exception, bearing testimony in its very basis to our human imperfections, to the inevitable prolongation of childhood into our manhood; but yet inseparably associated with the government of the country ever since the Crown ceased to be the predominating power in it, and our parliamentary institutions grew into their full development.

It would be beside the purpose of these pages to discuss the Reform Bill; though the time has now come, when its tale might well be fairly and dispassionately told. But on one among many prophecies, not all of the same colour, then confidently vented, but since falsified by the facts, we would pray the bestowal of a moment. It was confidently said, that the Reform Bill was to extinguish the system of government by party. But when once the momentary feeling had passed by, which gave to one section of politicians a factitious, and for the time an overwhelming strength, it became clear that the tendency of the Reform Bill

for

for the time was not to destroy, not even to mitigate, but to continue, nay, to sharpen and enhance the struggles of party. Town and Country, upon the whole, represent the respective preponderances in Great Britain of Church and Dissent, of Authority and Will, of Antiquity and Novelty, of Conservation and Reform; and Town and Country had received from the Reform Act each its separate organization, acutely distinct and angular, while all the intermediate, nondescript, miscellaneous influences, that under the old system had darkened the dividing lines and softened the shock of the adverse powers, had been but too ruthlessly swept away. The independent section of the House of Commons, which had previously been considerable, formed an altogether insignificant percentage of the first Reformed Parliament. In the second it was reduced to what in chemical analysis is usually denominated a trace.' 'trace.' It was imponderable, inappreciable. Before the crisis of 1841 it had become absolutely extinct; and we believe the articulus mortis was reached at the juncture when that respectable politician, Mr. George Frederick Young, ever the last to yield to what he thought wrong or doubtful, enlisted under the banners of the Conservative Opposition.

We now hear grey, or semi-grey politicians, those who begin to plead their having served their country for a quarter, at least, of a century and upwards, descanting, before the admiring babies of the last ten years' growth, on the comfort and satisfaction of the good old days of party government, before the great break up of 1846. Ah! those were times indeed. What close-running! what cheering! what whipping in! No loose fish ; no absentees: if a man broke his leg before a great division, it was a kind of petty treason. What harmonious meetings then in the diningrooms of leaders! What noctes cœnæque Deûm at the Carlton! if indeed it was not rather by the morning light, that men walked up Whitehall and Charing Cross, admired St. Paul's with a sidelong glance along Whitehall Place, before it was cut to pieces in the view by the cross lines of Hungerford Bridge, and reckoned with glee how the usual'working' majority for ministers of about three was progressively reduced to two, and to one. Such was the social and jovial side of the régime that then existed. But it had other aspects. No doubt it was a time, when some men economised the labours of thought and inquiry by casting wholesale on their leaders the responsibility of their votes; and when a doubting conscience was sometimes borne along, through insufficient light, by resistless sympathy, sometimes perhaps even by the mere servile dread of the intolerance of party censure. It was a time, no doubt, of strong antipathies; but it was also a time of strong attachments, 2 M

VOL. XCIX. NO. CXCVIII.

of

of unwavering confidence, of warm devotion. If a man detested one half of the House of Commons, at least he loved the other; and we very much doubt, as far as our information goes, whether at the present day the barometer of his hatreds has fallen so low as the thermometer of his affections. If his politics were not profound, they were intelligible; and so were his companions. Men were aware, in those days, with whom they rubbed shoulders; it was not then as now, when more than one quarter of the House of Commons presents precisely the appearance of the birds and animals known to street-wanderers as the happy family,' in all except its happiness. As we have seen it stated in a MS. review of the period, it was a time when the whole House was composed, on the one side or the other, of men who were really comrades; when comrades were friends, and leaders were almost idols; when every one who needed guidance was willing to seek for it, and when none who sought for it could fail to find it. Personal selfishness and vanity, levity and idle crotchets, were then much less rife than they now are, and the high moral results of a spirit of discipline were very perceptible in the dignified tone of the proceedings of Parliament, and in the degree of respect which it commanded from the community.' Even the Irish members had this advantage, under the iron rule of O'Connell, that they were positively prohibited from tearing one another to pieces in the name of their religion and their country.

Now, without at all arguing that there are no topics of comfort to be found, at least in the main causes which have brought about the present less hearty and intelligible state of things, we very seriously desire to call attention to the disastrous nature of the change which has occurred, in its bearings upon the efficiency of Parliament.

A first and superficial view of the House of Commons would suggest the idea, that a highly-organized state of political party must be unfavourable to efficient legislation, and that the absence or feebleness of party combination must make it comparatively easy. How can Lord Melbourne's government carry intricate questions of law and policy through all the turns and twists of the Parliamentary labyrinth, with its three hundred and thirty sworn supporters, when Sir Robert Peel sits opposite, watchful as a lynx, with full three hundred and twenty-five similarly conjured against the minister and his plans? Now the very fact which constitutes the danger, supplies the remedy.

Tu mihi fons vitæ, tu mihi causa necis.'

In the first place, this condition of the Opposition affords a security,

security, not to be equalled in any other manner, that the Government shall not fail to do its duty according to its own sense and perception of it. Blunders will be exposed, jobs denounced, weak places laid bare, all measures carefully probed and sifted; each of them, for each department, mainly by the man who, upon the next change of ministry, will himself be the minister for that department. But, strange to say, this state of things, affording an absolute guarantee that the Administration shall not have more than fair play, likewise furnishes the very best security of which the case admits, that it shall not have less. For both parties are playing for a stake of equal value in the eyes of each; the Ministry for the retention, the Opposition for the acquisition of power. If the stake of either be higher, it is that of the Opposition; for hope is sweeter than enjoyment, and there is some truth in the hack saying of political circles, that there are but two happy days in the life of a public man, the day when he obtains office, and the day when he resigns it.

Given the House of Commons, made up of a party in power and a party out: it is plain that what we should desire on behalf of the country is, stimulus to what is right for the party in, selfrestraint and circumspection for the party out. The former is supplied to the Government by the existence of an Opposition, and the Opposition finds the latter in the prospect of power. There is no such healthy check upon the action of abstract opinion, as a contingent liability to be called upon to give it practical effect. The expectant minister must be wary in condemnation, and still more wary in suggestion, when he knows that the very triumph he aims at will, if achieved, require him tomorrow or next day to deal with the case he is discussing ; that he may find the plan he has too rashly projected upon a nearer view impracticable, and the plan he has indignantly been denouncing the only one of which the case, when thoroughly examined, admits. All this is seen in the clearest light, and is, above all, known and felt beforehand; and not by effort, but by fixed habit. It is not a formal lesson; it is part of the Parliamentary atmosphere, which the British statesman breathes. These imperative considerations are enforced by the outcry which arises when they have been unhappily forgotten, or, in the heat of party excitement, casually overborne. Doleful is the case of the minister who, stung with shame and deafened by outcry, rises on the right of the Speaker's chair to propose what he had condemned from the left; and the notoriety of the case when it occurs by way of exception, together with the poignancy of the suffering which it causes to an honourable mind, affords ample proof of the efficacy, as a general rule, of what may be called for

2 M 2

politics,