by their opponents; but it rests with their opponents to achieve the same result by following the same course. Whenever Liberals choose to sink minor differences and unite for a common end, their triumph is complete; and this is not discipline, but agreement, they have but to agree among themselves in order to have their own way. When a child who has been once burned wilfully thrusts its finger into the fire again, it deserves chastisement rather than pity. When Liberals lose seats in Parliament owing to wilful disregard of the right course to pursue, they are the victims of their own recklessness and merit no sympathy.

I said at the outset that it was a mistake to ascribe the Liberal defeat in 1874 to the inimitable and irresistible organization of their adversaries. The same lack of organization, and indifference about it, prevailed in 1868, when the Conservatives were smitten hip and thigh. The Liberal party was not organized when the last unreformed Parliament gave Earl Grey a majority wherewith to carry the Reform Bill, nor was it organization which returned to the first Reformed Parliament the largest Liberal majority of which history bears record. Neither could any method of organization yet devised or imagined have prevented the majority pledged to support Earl Grey or Mr. Gladstone from melting away in the furnace of a general election. In the bad old times the government of the day could retain a majority during several successive Parliaments; but the Heptarchy will be revived before the same result can be produced by the employment of the same means.

The Liberal rout of 1874 was due, not so much to the defection of the regular members of the party as to the alienation of the vast and fluctuating body of electors that moves as public opinion directs. I need not discuss why it was that public opinion then veered in a particular direction; but it is certain that the many and splendid triumphs of Mr. Gladstone's Administration had as great a share and as direct an influence on the result as its grievous blunders. What has been overlooked is the part now played by the floating mass composed of electors who, having no settled convictions, are easily roused to frenzy for or against a particular course, are ready at one time to declare that the government has gone too far, and at another that it must be made to move on. This mass is impressionable as wax and unstable as water. When Liberals or Conservatives succeed in organizing' it, they will have learned the art of making ropes

out of sand.

It is a grave and deplorable error to attribute the Conservative victory to an accident, and to hope that the Liberal defeat can be retrieved in any other than one way. Till the Liberals are united, they must remain in opposition, and they can be united by persuasion alone. They must be induced to clear their minds of cant, as the preliminary to leavening their minds with common sense. It is cant

of the worst and most dangerous kind to contend that a few personal fancies and whims are the sum and substance of Liberal policy. The beginning of true Liberalism is toleration; its end is progress. The mark of a great Liberal leader is skill in discerning the signs of the times, noting the right moment when to give the word to advance, and when to counsel or command masterly inactivity. All the great Liberal measures, whether carried into effect by the Duke of Wellington or Earl Grey, by Sir Robert Peel or the Earl of Derby, or by Mr. Gladstone, have been permanent because the country was educated to submit to them patiently or to hail them with gratitude. Now that the Liberal party is in opposition, and seems destined to remain there for many years to come, its wisest policy would be to resume and continue the educational process through which the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Mr. Disraeli were compelled, in defiance of their party, to legislate on the basis of Liberalism. But a little more systematic and judicious pressure is required to induce the Earl of Beaconsfield to accept the credit, while rendering the service, of removing the grievance of English Nonconformists with regard to burials, and of adding another stone to the edifice of Reform by equalising the franchise in counties. Longer time and greater exertion will be required in order to obtain a still grander result. Stranger and more unexpected things have happened than that a Conservative Administration should settle all ecclesiastical disputes and scandals by a heroic and final measure of Church Disestablishment.

Before the Liberal party can discharge this duty aright, the passions which distract and the rivalries which enfeeble it must cease to paralyze its influence. Its present condition has been recently set forth in vigorous terms by Mr. Fawcett, when he remarked that its increasing tendency is to split into numberless little sections, each of them cherishing its little pet opinion and each member exclaiming, 'If I cannot get my pet hobby gratified, I will assume an attitude of sulk, and I will vote for its opponents.' One section holds that woman's suffrage is the only thing wanted to regenerate the country, and usher in the millennium. Another, thinking that a fabulous golden age will become a reality so soon as public-houses are lessened in number, cares for nothing but the Permissive Bill and withholds support from anyone who differs from it in opinion. A third, which is determined to pave the way for dissolving the Union by establishing Home Rule in Ireland, can count upon the active aid of Mr. Parnell, who advised the electors of Greenock to vote for a Conservative though he repudiated Home Rule, rather than for any Liberal who, with every desire to treat Ireland fairly and impartially, was unable to countenance such a measure. A fourth maintains that the first, if not the sole, subject of public sympathy and parliamentary action is the grievance of the ex-butcher who has been imprisoned for fraud, instead of

entering into undisturbed possession of another man's property. A fifth considers that the Legislature should give precedence to upholding the liberty of the subject by repealing Acts which operate to hinder the indiscriminate propagation of loathsome and deadly contagious diseases. Though the list is not exhausted, yet I have cited enough to show the nature of the questions which perpetuate jealousy among Liberals, dividing them into antagonistic sections, and parting even the members of the same political clubs by barriers as well defined as those which keep the two parties asunder. In the noiseless, slow and effective action of Time, the great reconciler, is to be found the only cure for this process of disintegration. If the party but wait with patience, it will be able to rejoice over the arrival of the day when even the Claimant and his uncompromising and noisy friends will cease from troubling and impassioned Home Rulers will be at rest.

Mr. Chamberlain refuses to let the party recover its equilibrium, and recruit its energies through the operation of this simple, natural, and unfailing remedy. His belief in the virtue of organization is characteristic of an ardent man; his desire to go forward at all hazards is what might be expected from an enthusiastic one. I commend his good intentions while disapproving of his plan. Indeed, he deserves consideration and respect because, in common with Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Cowen among the younger members of the House of Commons, he has given promise of developing from a clever and skilful politician into an able and trusted statesman. But the best of motives cannot excuse or recommend a device for dealing with the temporary aberration of the Liberal party, which is equivalent to putting it into a strait-jacket. Mr. Leatham is the only distinguished member of Parliament who has yet had the courage to protest against the craze for organization which is a sign of that party being sick almost unto death, and ready in its despair to undergo any form of treatment. He candidly avowed to his constituents at Huddersfield, in the forcible language of which he is a master, that he would rather the party were effaced altogether than that it should exist under the conditions of parties in the United States. Such is the condition upon which it must exist should the Birmingham system become the rule of its life. In Birmingham, as Mr. Crosskey writes, the Liberal electors are not free lances; they are armies of disciplined men, well accustomed to stand side by side, and to move in unbroken battalions.' This phraseology is of evil import. It implies that the way has been prepared for conducting and describing an electoral contest as a campaign,' at the close of which the scandalous cry will be raised of 'woe to the vanquished' and 'the spoils to the victors.'

Possibly I have exaggerated the progress made to stifle Liberalism under the form of organizing it. Bankrupt though it be in the vivifying element of concord, it is a millionaire in priceless traditions. Happily it can count upon firm adherents to whom the preservation of its

traditions is as dear as the breath of their nostrils, and who would not flinch from undergoing on its behalf the martyrdom of Sir Henry Vane and Algernon Sydney. I fervently hope that when over-organization shall have caused the reduction of the Liberal minority in the House of Commons at the next general election, there will be a salutary reaction against a system which is most to be dreaded on the morrow of a great electoral triumph. The only success of the Liberal party which is worthy of unstinted welcome and applause is that achieved through the action of men whose devotion to it is intensified by the heartfelt conviction that its service, like its ideal, is perfect freedom.

W. FRASER RAE.

FORCE, ENERGY AND WILL.

ONE benefit due to the advance of physical science is, as Professor Clarke Maxwell has remarked, the introduction into common speech of words and phrases consistent with true ideas about nature instead of others implying false ideas. But though our scientific progress has produced this amongst so many other beneficent effects, yet, as its advancing stream has left here and there a stagnant pool, so we may not unreasonably expect every now and then to meet even with a temporary verbal backwater. Thus electrical discovery by the term electric fluid' has left in the popular mind the illusion that electricity is a fluid substance which flows from one body to another. But a really grave misconception (in some respects a retrograde error) appears to me to be coming daily more diffused with regard to the conceptions energy' and 'force.'

The term 'force' has, of course, definite and exact meanings1 (not always quite consistent however) assigned to it in physics; but it is the more general, not the exact use of the term to which reference is here made. 'Force' becomes known to us partly through the sense of effort and resistance overcome which attends our muscular activity, and partly through the exercise of will, as perceived in exerting our voluntary mental activity-force of mind being a term of familiar use as well as force of arm. We have, therefore, force in our own being as the active exercise of mental and bodily powers which are possessed by our complex organisms. The sensations of effort and resistance we experience are the occasions through and by which our intellect comes to perceive that surrounding bodies

1 Thus Professor Tait, in his Lectures on Some Recent Advances in Physical Science, defines (at page 16) 'force' as 'any cause which alters or tends to alter a body's natural state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line.' At page 354 he says: Force is the rate of change of momentum,' and adds that the term 'is obviously to be applied to any pull, push, pressure, tension, attraction or repulsion, &c., whether applied by a stick or a string, a chain or a girder, or by means of an invisible medium such as that whose existence is made certain by the phenomena, of light and radiant heat.' At page 358 he adds: Force is the rate at which an agent does work per unit of length.' In Nature, July 5, 1877, he tells us : 'In all probability there is no such thing as force.' Force is often taken to denote 'the unknown cause of energy,' 'energy being the power possessed by a body of overcoming a resistance.' Force is also defined as 'mass animated by velocity, or directed pressure.'