while seeming to follow, often to follow while seeming to lead. Of gifts like these Mr. Lowe had no share. He never became more than a great Parliamentary critic of the acrid and vitriolic style.

Almost immediately on the assembling of the new Parliament, Mr. Villiers brought forward a resolution not merely pledging the House of Commons to a Free-trade policy, but pouring out a sort of censure on all who had hitherto failed to recognize its worth. This step was thought necessary, and was indeed made necessary by the errors of which Lord Derby had been guilty, and the preposterous vaporings of some of his less responsible followers. If the resolution had been passed, the Government must have resigned. They were willing enough now to agree to any resolution declaring that Free-trade was the established policy of the country; but they could not accept the triumphant eulogium which the resolution proposed to offer to the commercial policy of the years when they were the uncompromising enemies of that very policy. They could submit to the panishment imposed on them; but they did not like this public kissing of the rod and doing penance. Lord Palmerston, who, even up to that time, regarded his ultimate acceptance of office under Lord Derby as a not impossible event if once the Derby party could shake themselves quite free of Protection, devised an amendment which afforded them the means of a more or less honorable retreat. This resolution pledged the House to the "policy of unrestricted competition firmly maintained and prudently extended;" but recorded no panegyric of the legislation of 1846, and consequent condemnation of those who opposed that legislation. The amendment was accepted by all but the small band of irreconcilable Protectionists: 468 voted for it; only 53 against it; and the moan of Protection was made. All that long chapter of English legislation was closed. Various commercial and other" interests" did indeed afterward demur to the application of the principle of unrestricted competition to their peculiar concerns. But they did not plead for Protection. They only contended that the Protection. they sought for was not, in fact, Protection at all, but Freetrade under peculiar circumstances. The straightforward doctrine of Protection perished of the debate of November, 1852.

Still, the Government only existed on sufferance. Their tenure of office was somewhat rudely compared to that of a bailiff put into possession of certain premises, who is liable to be sent away at any moment when the two parties concerned in the litigation choose to come to terms. There was

a general expectation that the moment Mr. Disraeli came to set out a genuine financial scheme the fate of the Government would be decided. So the event proved. Mr. Disraeli made a financial statement which showed remarkable capacity for dealing with figures. It was subjected to a far more serious test than his first budget, for that was necessarily a mere stop-gap or makeshift. This was a real budget, altering and reconstructing the financial system and the taxation of the country. The skill with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained his measures and tossed his figures about convinced many even of his strongest opponents that he had the capacity to make a good budget if he only were allowed to do so by the conditions of his party's existence. But his cabinet had come into office under special obligations to the country party and the farmers. They could not avoid making some experiment in the way of special legislation for the farmers: they had, at the very least, to put on an appearance of doing something for them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer might be supposed to be in the position of the soldier in Hogarth's "March to Finchley," between the rival claimants on his attention. He has promised and vowed to the one; but he knows that the slightest mark of civility he offers to her will be fiercely resented by the other. When Mr. Disraeli undertook to favor the country interest and the farmers, he must have known only too well that he was setting all the Free-traders and Peelites against him; and he knew at the same time that if he neglected the country party he was cutting the ground from beneath his feet. The principle of his budget was the reduction of the malt duties and the increase of the inhabited house duty. Some manipulations of the income-tax were to be introduced, chiefly with a view to lighten the impost on farmers' profits; and there was to be a modest reduction of the tea duty. The two points that stood out clear and prominent before the House of Commons were the reduction of the malt duty and the increase of the duty on inhabited

houses. The reduction of the malt-tax, as Mr. Lowe said in his pungent criticism, was the key-stone of the budget. That reduction created a deficit, which the inhabited house duty had to be doubled in order to supply. The scheme was a complete failure. The farmers did not care much about the concession which had been made in their favor; those who had to pay for it in doubled taxation were bitterly indignant. Mr. Disraeli had exasperated the one claimant, and not greatly pleased the other. The Government soon saw how things were likely to go. The Chancellor of the Exchequer began to see that he had only a desperate fight to make. The Whigs, the Free-traders, the Peelites, and such independent members or unattached members as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Bernal Osborne, all fell on him. It became a combat à outrance. It well suited Mr. Disraeli's peculiar temperament. During the whole of his Parliamentary career he has never fought so well as when he has been free to indulge to the full the courage of despair.

CHAPTER XXIV.

MR. GLADSTONE.

THE debate was one of the finest of its kind ever heard in Parliament during our time. The excitement on both sides was intense. The rivalry was hot and eager. Mr. Disraeli was animated by all the power of desperation, and was evidently in a mood neither to give nor to take quarter. He assailed Sir Charles Wood, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a vehemence and even a virulence which certainly added much to the piquancy and interest of the discussion so far as listeners were concerned, but which more than once went to the very verge of the limits of Parliamentary decorum. It was in the course of this speech that Disraeli, leaning across the table and directing his words full at Sir Charles Wood, declared, "I care not to be the right honorable gentleman's critic, but if he has learned his business, he has yet to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective." The House had not heard the concluding word of Disraeli's bitter and impassioned speech,

when at two o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet to answer him. Then began that long Parliamentary duel which only knew a truce when at the close of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli crossed the threshold of the House of Commons for the last time, thenceforward to take his place among the peers as Lord Beaconsfield. During all the intervening four-and-twenty years these two men were rivals in power and in Parliamentary debate as much as ever Pitt and Fox had been. Their opposition, like that of Pitt and Fox, was one of temperament and character as well as of genius, position, and political opinion. The rivalry of this first heated and eventful night was a splendid display. Those who had thought it impossible that any impression could be made upon the House after the speech of Mr. Disraeli, had to acknowledge that a yet greater impression was produced by the unprepared reply of Mr. Gladstone. The House divided about four o'clock in the morning, and the Government were left in a minority of nineteen. Mr. Disraeli took the defeat with his characteristic composure. The morning was cold and wet. "It will be an unpleasant day for going to Osborne," he quietly remarked to a friend as they went down Westminster Hall together and looked out into the dreary streets. That day, at Osborne, the resignation of the ministry was formally placed in the hands of the Queen.

In a few days after, the Coalition Ministry was formed. Lord Aberdeen was Prime-minister; Lord John Russell took the Foreign Office; Lord Palmerston became Home Secretary; Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The public were a good deal surprised that Lord Palmerston had taken such a place as that of Home Secretary. His name had been identified with the foreign policy of England, and it was not supposed that he felt the slightest interest in the ordinary business of the Home Department. Palmerston himself explained in a letter to his brother that the Home Office was his own choice. He was not anxious to join the ministry at all; and if he had to make one, he preferred that he should hold some office in which he had personally no traditions. "I had long settled in my own mind," he said, " that I would not go back to the Foreign Office, and that if I ever took any office it should be the Home. It does not do for a man

to pass his whole life in one department, and the Home Office deals with the concerns of the country internally, and brings one in contact with one's fellow-countrymen; besides which it gives one more influence in regard to the militia and the defences of the country." Lord Palmerston, in fact, announces that he has undertaken the business of the Home Office for the same reason as that given by Fritz, in the "Grande Duchesse," for becoming a school-master. "Can you teach ?" asks the Grande Duchesse. "No," is the answer; "c'est pour apprendre; ," "I go to learn." The reader may well suspect, however, that it was not only with a view of learning the business of the internal administration and becoming acquainted with his fellow-countrymen that Palmerston preferred the Home Office. He would not consent to be Foreign Secretary on any terms but his own, and these terms were then out of the question.

He

The principal interest felt in the new Government was not, however, centred in Lord Palmerston. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer was the man upon whom the eyes of curiosity and interest were chiefly turned. Mr. Gladstone was still a young man, in the Parliamentary sense at least. was but forty-three. His career had been in every way remarkable. He had entered public life at a very early age. He had been, to quote the words of Macaulay, a distinguished debater in the House of Commons ever since he was oneand-twenty. Criticising his book, "The State in its Relations with the Church," which was published in 1838, Macaulay speaks of Gladstone as "a young man of unblemished character and of distinguished Parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader whose experience is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor." The time was not so far away when the stern and unbending Tories would regard Gladstone as the greatest hope of their most bitter enemies. Lord Macaulay goes on to overwhelm the views expressed by Mr. Gladstone as to the relations between State and Church, with a weight of argument and gorgeousness of illustration that now seem to have been hardly called for. One of the doctrines of the young statesman which Macaulay confutes with especial warmth is the principle which, as