politics, more justly than for population, the preventive check. This teaches us, that a weak Opposition may be, nay almost must be, unscrupulous; but that a strong Opposition must be measured, guarded, balanced, alike in its declarations and its votes. Nor must we allow ourselves to be wheedled out of those views of the case which common sense suggests and experience confirms, by objections of the sentimental and maudlin class. may be told that we have represented public men as being actuated solely by a lust of office, which means personal advantage, and as being habituated to weigh public measures only in the scales of selfish interest. This is far from the truth, which in practical subjects is commonly missed alike by optimists and pessimists, and certainly by the latter at least as much as by the former. The appetite for office, in many cases we are assured, and in all we may trust, is not the lust of pecuniary or other personal advantage, nor even mainly the craving for distinction or for power as an object in itself; but it is the desire of ardent minds for a larger space and scope within which to serve the country, and for access to the command of that powerful machinery for information and for action, which the public departments supply, and which multiplies the means of usefulness for a minister, in a degree far beyond any that personal diligence and private resources can enable him to attain. He must be a very bad minister indeed, who does not do ten times the good to the country when he is in office, that he would do when he is out of it; because he has helps and opportunities which multiply twentyfold, as by a system of wheels and pulleys, his power for doing it. The present First Lord of the Treasury has, to his honour, always been above the timid and feeble tone of those who think it necessary to affect a coyness with respect to office, and who can talk of nothing but the sacrifices they made to duty on the last occasion of accepting, or, as the case may chance to stand, of resigning it. His language, we believe, has always been frankly to the effect, that office is the natural and proper object of a public man's ambition, as the sphere in which he can most freely use his powers, be they what they may, for the interest and advantage of his country. And the responsibility of the Opposition, if it be strong, that is, if it be in a condition to take office upon its being vacated by the actual possessors, is twofold: they are punished by failure in the attempt to gain it; or again, they are punished by shame and scorn if, after having gained it, they attempt to hold it by policy and by measures which when in opposition they denounced. But if the Opposition be weak, if it be not so manned and and organized as to take office upon the occurrence of an opportunity, then the case is very different. It is not punished by failure to attain that which if offered it is unable to assume; it is not punished by the prospective shame of administering inconsistently what it never seriously hopes to administer at all. And if there is no contingent punishment to follow upon miscarriage, there is no responsibility at all. But the responsibility of the Opposition, as we have explained it, is no less than that of the Government itself, the life soul and energy of our parliamentary system. An Opposition which is weak, and which therefore is not responsible, can only satisfy its natural appetencies in the idle explosions of malevolent passion, in seizing such occasions as chance may send for catching at momentary notoriety, or in intriguing with discontented sections for the overthrow of the Government, sometimes under vague hopes from the chapter of accidents, sometimes upon the pious principle that what is bad for our antagonists cannot but in the end be good for ourselves. Not that a weak Opposition is of set purpose indeed, more than a strong one is patriotic and virtuous by vow: but as the one is placed in circumstances such as to favour and promote a discharge of its duties upon the whole satisfactory, even so the other is deprived, to such a great degree, of the incentives to beneficial exertion, and of the checks upon folly, precipitancy, and fraud, as to leave little or no chance to the better in their conflict with the worse parts of our nature. But it is high time that, abandoning the region of argument and speculation, we should come to facts, and point out in some detail the nature and extent of the evil to which we desire to draw attention, namely, what may be termed the paralysis of Parliament as the great organ of the constitution for its highest purposes. This is an evil which has been since the year 1846 of almost constantly growing force, and which under the present administration has reached a height quite without example since the time when the settlement of European affairs in 1815 permitted, and the loud voice of public necessity required, the legislature to set about its work in earnest. The premiership of Lord John Russell, from 1846 to 1852, but ill bears comparison with his leadership from 1835 to 1841. The two periods were nearly of the same duration. In the first of them he held only the second place in the ministry; the second saw him at its head. Under Lord Melbourne he had to confront a minority, which at the outset came within thirty of the number of his own supporters, and which gradually reduced that margin until it came to a cipher; while it was conducted by parliamentary leaders, whose combination of talent, skill, and experience with most most remarkable faculties for business was almost, if not altogether, unparalleled in our annals. But the Government of Lord John Russell was scarcely confronted by an opposition at all. There were occasional rallies under Lord George Bentinck and Mr. Disraeli, to take a vote on the subject of protection; but there was no organized staff of statesmen watching with a jealous eye and habitually criticising the operations of Government, as occasion offered, in each of its departments. Again, the calibre of the men had not fallen off; for the heads of departments were by no means inferior to those who had served under Lord Melbourne-rather, indeed, the reverse; and the minister himself had the advantage of ten more years of experience in parliamentary leadership since he had acted with Lord Melbourne. Every circumstance, if we compare the two periods, would appear at first sight to have been in favour of the second as against the first; but in point of performance, none can doubt the superiority of the first over the second. We have enumerated a few of the parliamentary achievements of Lord John Russell as leader for Lord Melbourne: as leader for himself he did not pass one single measure of a class to take rank with any of them except the repeal of the Navigation Laws. Now of this, although it was a necessary and immediate postscript to the Corn Act of 1846, he postponed the settlement until 1849; and he then contrived his measure so as neither to gratify the free-traders by making a clean sweep of the reductions on the coasting trade (which was done by Mr. Cardwell on behalf of Lord Aberdeen's Government in 1854), nor to soothe the protectionists, and at the same time realise the full advantages of his measure, by obtaining the reciprocity which America through Mr. Bancroft had promptly offered. We pass by the financial history of this Government, as we shall hereafter do in regard to the Government of Lord Palmerston, with the same decorous silence as that of the administration of Lord Melbourne: nor do we suppose that among the multitudes of all classes, who thought that the insolence of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman would best be repressed by legislation, there is one who feels himself indebted to the Russell Government for the abortive measure that it placed upon the statute book under the name of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. The provisions of the Irish Poor Law were extended under sheer necessity; and the statesmanlike conception of the Encumbered Estates Act, which originated with Sir Robert Peel in a remarkable speech, was forced upon a reluctant and objecting Ministry by general opinion. Neither, again, do we give credit to that Government for the Act which altered the constitution of the Australian Colonies, for it was a measure a measure alike falling short of the exigences of the case, and the state of the public feeling, as exhibited by the debates, at the time when it was passed through Parliament. The question, however, which we are at present discussing is not the policy which should have been pursued; but, as most persons would agree that legislation must be adapted to the growing wants and changes of society, we are pointing out how inefficient was the ministry to accomplish this indispensable end. We know not to what this marked decline in Whig Administration can justly be ascribed, except to that disorganization of party which followed upon the events of 1846. It may indeed be true that Lord John Russell was in a minority before the dissolution of 1847, and that even after it he could hardly claim a clear majority of his own pledged supporters. But he had other unpledged supporters, who were quite as steady and of far greater weight. Governed by fears which subsequent experience proved to be altogether chimerical, Sir Robert Peel apparently deemed it his first duty, during this period, to prevent the accession to power of a party favourable to agricultural protection. Accordingly, drawing with him by his great and just authority a portion of his former colleagues and adherents, he spent the four last, and perhaps most questionable, years of his political life in securing power to those whom he had up to that time constantly opposed, and to whose opinions he had himself undergone no conversion. This stage in his career has, it is no more than fair to notice, secured the eloquent praise of M. Guizot; but, without questioning the integrity of his motives, we presume to doubt whether he acted in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment. At any rate, thus it happened that Lord John Russell's Government was secured in majorities, in ease, in most weighty countenance, and in access to the best advice. Why did it fall so far short of its former self, and run a career so little distinguished in the eyes either of its opponents, of its friends, or of the country at large? Was it not the absence of that tension on both sides which is the necessary condition of activity, and which can only result, according to all such experience as our history supplies, from the distribution of the mass of the two Houses of Parliament into parties under the guidance of those in whom confidence is placed, and who are on the one side with the minister in possession proving by his acts his right to govern, on the other side with the minister in expectancy, proving by his criticism upon *Revue des Deux Mondes, Septembre, 1856. such such of those acts as he disapproves, and by his expositions of his own prospective policy, his superior fitness to hold the reins of power? Action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions. The action is with Government, the reaction is that which we term opposition. It is not true, but the reverse of truth, that a strong Opposition makes a weak Government. A strong Opposition makes a strong Government: for it either makes the Government strong in its merits and services and in the fidelity and loyalty of its supporters, or when by the failure and prostration of these it has made the Government weak, it becomes the strong Government itself, and sends the former Administration to lie fallow in retirement, and, as quickly as it may, to grow fresh and vigorous again. And as with a strong Opposition we have a strong Government, so with a weak Opposition we have a weak Government, and with no Opposition we have, for the purposes of which we now speak, no Government at all. Three sessions yet remain, before we come to the present Administration, for rapid and cursory_review. In the beginning of March, 1852, Lord Derby and his friends entered upon their parliamentary labours. They were avowedly supported only by a minority in the then existing Parliament; and an understanding was arrived at, that they should confine themselves to such measures as were of immediate urgency, and should then without delay counsel the Crown to dissolve the Parliament, with a view to that early and final settlement of the whole question of Protection, which was admitted on all hands to be so desirable. The business of the session was accordingly carried through in a period of four months, and under these circumstances it would be unjust, even to absurdity, that we should require from the Derby administration a great array of legislative achievements: yet, we believe, even its bitterest opponents will be prepared to admit that it is liable in this respect to no discredit. The question of the militia was settled: a constitution, conveying many valuable privileges, was enacted for New Zealand, and, if we are rightly informed, it proved at least sufficiently acceptable to the people of that colony to make Sir John Pakington the most popular within its limits of our innumerable Colonial Secretaries. The Chancery Reforms, too, at this time became law. If it be replied, that this list of legislative measures is but slender, let it be recollected that they were the produce of no more than half a session; and let it also be borne in mind, with a view to equal justice, that this list, though the work of a Government supported by a minority and |