high responsibilities and its great opportunities. The Radical and independent Liberal party has long practised what, to speak plainly, we must call an imposture on the country, by its annual sham-fight on the Ballot: it is now practising, perhaps unconsciously, a deceit not less gross upon itself: for, by standing before the country as primarily answerable for the feebleness and effeteness of parliamentary action, it will speedily lose the best part of whatever qualified hold it may have upon the public respect.

Some of those observers of public affairs who might agree with us in lamenting the present decadence of Parliament, and even in perceiving a connexion between that decadence and the disorganised state of the old party connexions, may see a shorter way, than we ourselves do, to effectual improvement. They perhaps think that, after all, the simple cure lies in the reconstruction of what is called the 'old Conservative party.' Among the anomalies and solecisms of the Lower House in its present condition, one of the greatest, without doubt, is the position of those gentlemen who pass by the appellation of Peelites, and who, ejected from office by their scruples and difficulties in respect to the Sebastopol Committee, have since maintained an attitude which the country, as represented by its press, plainly considers to be equivocal. Moreover it is plain that, among all the outliers from the great parties, none, not even Lord John Russell, so powerfully tend to prolong the existing state of general weakness, and the relaxation in party organisation. Not that they are powerful either in their numbers or in the general favour, but that by their traditions, if not by their characters, they happen to have points of contact and of sympathy, rather marked in their character, with gentlemen sitting on both sides of the House who own no general political connexion with them. It was certainly characteristic of Sir Robert Peel to combine fearlessness in regard to administrative changes with no small dread of constitutional innovation. Whether governed by a superstitious adherence to the maxims of their leader, or whether really and conscientiously imbued with the same spirit, the Peelite exMinisters are seen to take a more forward place than the Government in regard to many questions of administrative reform; while on the other hand, in cases such as the resolutions of Lord John Russell on education, or the bill for the retirement of the two bishops, they are found among the loudest denouncers of change, as being dangerous, or undefined, or not warranted by the pleas that are urged in its favour. They thus operate as solvents of party connexion, in a manner and degree for which their mere numbers or personal qualities would not account: each

of

of these kinds of occasion alternately seeming to place the Peelite politicians in relations with various members of the two parties as close as, or even for the moment closer than, those in which they may habitually stand to their own recognised leaders.

Perceiving clearly, as we do, the evils of a position which cannot we apprehend be satisfactory either to those who observe or those who hold it, we shall not jump to the conclusion that it rests with these gentlemen, or with any one else, to abate the nuisance by any act of their volition. Of the jealousies and suspicions inevitably characteristic of a Parliament without parties thoroughly organised, a larger share perhaps alights on the party now supposed to be led by Lord Aberdeen, than on any other class, knot, or clique of politicians whatever. And it should be remembered that in general neither jealousy nor suspicion can be overcome by any measures taken for the purpose of overcoming them they can only be disarmed by the more natural and spontaneous action of events moving in their own course, and by the slow and silent, but powerful, influence of considerations of the public interest upon judgment and conscience, which in the long run, though not always at the moment, determine the action of political party. It is plain that those who are now dissociated, either wholly or partially, and either on the one side of the House or on the other, from the leading parties, ought, if they are ever again to be found in the ranks, to be found in those ranks where their sympathies may principally lie; and the question which ranks those are must commonly receive its answer, partly indeed from the tempers of individuals, but chiefly from the course of public affairs, and from the tendency of this great question or of that to grow for the time to a paramount and commanding importance in its bearing on the interests of the country.

Mindful, in one respect at least, of the modesty which befits our calling, we shall not presume to attempt pointing out particular modes in which the existing confusions can be cleared, and the motley mobs of the House of Commons restored to something more resembling the old, costumed, and regimental character of its accustomed organisation; but we shall throw together, in general terms, a few propositions which appear to us to be placed nearly beyond dispute.

First of all then the constituencies, as we have intimated above, do not appear to feel, as their representatives have felt, the debilitating and disorganising influences so patent within the walls of Parliament. Whether they have or have not distinctive opinions-whether they seek or do not seek separate and opposite ends—whether the antagonist candidates can or cannot succeed

in imparting to their respective speeches and addresses a decent amount of difference-it is beyond all doubt that, as the constituencies have been, so they mean to continue, divided as Conservative and Liberal respectively; and none of the wizards of Peelism, or of Palmerstonism, or of Manchesterism, or of Administrative Reform, or of Voluntaryism, or of any other personal, intermediate, sectional, or hybrid creed, will, at least in our day, dislodge them from the impregnable stronghold of their set electioncering habits and ideas, commonly as simple and homogeneous as the colours which, in the days when such things were, used to distinguish the flags and ribands of contending parties.

Secondly, while the electioneering gear continues to be much in the same working order as it was, it is plain that a public opinion has for many years been forming itself both broad and deepbroader in some respects and deeper too than the limits of party organisation. This public opinion is considerably adverse to speculation or constitutional changes, but is disposed to view with great favour all active and efficient government, comparatively careless from which party such a boon to the country may proceed. Ballot is moonshine; even the Church Rate agitation seems to have reference principally to the hustings; nobody cares to try and turn the Bishops out of Parliament; the County Rate is still imposed and spent by a non-elective body; the unpaid magistracy, the law of succession to landed property, the hereditary peerage, the Established Church, are politically tranquil-no storm whistles round their ears. That one of the two great parties, we venture to predict, will acquire the predominance in Parliament and in the country, which succeeds in impressing the public mind with the belief that it is most deeply and earnestly impressed with the right (a right not the less real because indeterminate) of the people to what is called good government, and that it is also most largely gifted with the qualities necessary to enable it to satisfy that right and the reasonable desires which attend it.

Thirdly, as respects the system of policy and conduct which we have endeavoured to express by the term good government, there never was a time when the Parliamentary field was more open, less thronged with labourers. Happily restored from war to peace, we want efficient establishments, with a just and strict economy; and this demand undoubtedly involves the searching and circumspect reconsideration of almost the whole of our military arrangements. At some period, we may be certain, the merely demagogic cry for economy will arise, and we can only be well prepared to meet it when it comes by placing ourselves before its arrival in a condition to show that the public get value for the money which they are called upon to spend. We want, again, that high

minded and temperate foreign policy, which seeking peace seeks it through honour, which abhors the spirit of intermeddling, which trusts liberally till it has found cause to be mistrustful, which disdains under all circumstances subterfuge and evasion, and which is careful above all things that its bark shall not be worse than its bite. We want a clean-handed and disinterested administration of patronage, and a frank and full practical admission of the truth that, as in the judgment of Mr. Burke, parsimony was a magnum vectigal, so purity and efficiency in the public establishments are among the best props of government. We want the maintenance of the public credit at the highest point, and of the public revenue in a condition fully to meet all the demands of the service of Her Majesty. We might pass to other subjects, such as the reform of the law, the great Indian question, the improvement of the provision, as far as the law can improve it, for the discharge by the Church of her holy duties; but passing on from particulars, we will venture to add we want, most of all, that a character of seriousness and earnestness should be once more impressed upon the proceedings of the Parliament, and that, if it is determined to retain its privilege of laughing at bad spoken jokes, at least it will not allow its whole proceedings to assume the character of a bad joke put into action. The party that shall most resolutely embark in this career, and shall at the same time most steadily discountenance all peddling and tampering with the venerated institutions of the country, will, we believe, soon be the uppermost party in public estimation, and in the influence and power which that estimation never fails to confer.

There is one more, and that an organic question, which we would willingly have avoided, but on which we are compelled to touch; it is that of the attitude and of the political rights of our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects. This journal has viewed with little favour the recent movement of which Mr. Spooner has been in the House of Commons the conscientious and determined organ; but we see plainly that the course of events at present tends to give to that movement a force and a success, which we would gladly see it deprived of all claim whatever to attain ; inasmuch as we cannot regard the contingency of its triumph without serious misgivings for the permanency of the present ecclesiastical settlement in Ireland. We do not mean that the people of this country are growing more intolerant-far otherwise; but our meaning is, that the whole course and policy of the Church of Rome, at home and abroad, in the gross and in detail, partakes so much of the character of a perpetual provocation, and so seriously tends to raise the question, which nothing but the very last necessity should induce us to revive, of the com

petency

petency of Roman Catholics, believing and above all practising according to the present fashion of their Church, for the due discharge of political rights. When we look abroad we see that Church as the odious oppressor, through the Papal Government, of the Roman people, as the darkling conspirator against the wise government and infant liberties of Sardinia, as the trafficker who in Austria purchases the revival of the immunities of the middle ages for a consideration not stated in the deed, but we fear well understood to be the determined support of injustice. The monstrous and unheard-of extravagances, to which she has recently pushed her theology, are matters of a less direct, but still a kindred, bearing on the state of the English mind. But what is most proximate and most serious to us is, the great and deleterious change which has passed in our own country upon the mind of her that says she never changes. A band of proselytes, bred in the Church of England, have passed within the Papal borders, and seem to have carried with them a flame of ultramontane fanaticism that has already given a new face to the Anglo-Roman body. The readers of our history are well aware, that in former times this narrow portion of the Romish pale was under the full sway of all the milder and tempering influences, which have often so beneficially softened and restrained the peculiar liabilities of that communion, and have, in particular, assisted to establish, when they have been dominant, a considerable, or even a cordial, harmony between it and the secular power. But the case has always been widely different, when the ultramontane or high Papal opinions have prevailed. Even these, however, have of late received a new and portentous development through the system of what is called direction.' Under this system, the Roman Catholic who follows it goes to his priest not only to assist his conscience in dis burdening itself for the past, but to take orders from him-we can call them nothing less without falling short of the truth-as to the line of conduct he shall pursue in all the most sacred relations, the most intimate and delicate duties of life. For example, supposing him to be a person who has recently fallen into the toils of the Romish Church, it is from the priest that he hears how he is to deal with his own wife and children, and what compulsion or coercion he may or must use with them for their soul's health. When he has heard, he has only to obey; or, at least, the case is not much mended in the eyes of Englishmen, if we are apprised that he has still an appeal from the priest to the bishop, and from the bishop, in the last resort, to the Pope. Now we do not speak lightly or at random when we say, that this system is alive and active in England at this moment; a system which we can only compare in its operation on the mind to a

contract