be old English phrase, Popery and arbitrary | the Border, in the affections of the people. power.' To escape from greater evils, the A course of rapid industrial progress country accepted evils which were less. gan, which entailed a multitude of economiTo advance would have been better than cal and moral changes in society, and to stand still: but it was better to remain created numerous wants before unknown. where we were without advancing, than to But a torpid organ does not resume its aclose the ground which former generations tivity at call; and the political system of had made good. The extravagant lauda- the eighteenth century, with its cast of partions of the two first Georges and their ties, had been formed with reference to the period, which were once so common, are state of the succession, and had become only to be excused as due to the excited wedded to those subjects which bore upon feelings of men under the pressure of con- it, namely at home a certain balance bestant alarm excited by the ever impending tween religious parties, and abroad the prereturn of the Stuarts. In truth that pair vention of French preponderance: a policy of very indifferent Sovereigns and most un- which flattered the national tendency to attractive human beings, were the suffi- expansion, by the opportunities it afforded cient and only bar between our laws and for colonial conquest. And unhappily the institutions on one side, and almost certain great American quarrel, springing out of the ruin on the other. There were other debt and financial difficulties which were drawbacks, too, connected with the Hano- the legacy of former wars, now again abverian succession, aud other evils, of which sorbed the energies of England; and init is not easy to distribute the responsi- volving her towards its later stages in a bility, though we still groan under their desperate struggle with Europe, as well as effects. But into the higher sphere of with her own kindred, forcibly as it were morals and religion we do not at present adjourned the solution of the rapidly multienter, farther than to express the surprise plying problems of our internal government. with which we find Mr. Macaulay laying When Mr. Pitt became minister, he applied on the altar of Whiggism a sacrifice so himself with gigantic energy to that porcostly, as the assertion that the reign of tion of the public exigencies, which was the Charles the Second supplies us with the most pressing, and thoroughly re-establishmost immoral period in the history, not of ed our finances. It is hard to say what the court only, but of the nation. might not have been anticipated from his vigour and wisdom, combined with a continuance of peace. But the hurricane of the French Revolution swept over the face of Europe, and drew him into a war which again postponed for a quarter of a century almost all attempts at legislative progress, with the splendid but isolated exceptions of the union with Ireland and the abolition of the Slave-Trade. At the close of the war we found ourselves with heavy finan cial embarrassments, with a depreciated currency, with all the establishments of the country swollen to unnatural proportions, with a poor-law threatening almost to absorb landed property, while it also demoralized the middle class by parish jobbery, and by subserviency the lower, with a vast increase of population, and a general shifting in the relations of the various classes of the community. Not only had the work left undone by four or five generations accumulated upon one, but the whole period, which had been negative as to clearing off incumbrances, had been active in creat ing them; on the one hand, the processes of decay had taken their usual course, and antiquity required reparation; on the other, the youth and prolific vigour of the country had brought new ideas, new relations, new spheres of life into existence, and no The political insecurity, however, which retarded legislation during the barren period we have just described, also diminished the urgency of the need for it. For it is rapid growth in the body politic that renders stereotyped law intolerable. When progress is slow and doubtful in the country at large, a better shift can be made, than when the elastic force which swells in every limb threatens to burst its swathing bands, unless they be enlarged from time to time. The first half century of our Hanoverian history was not, in our belief, a period of rapid growth, and would scarcely have been a period of growth at all, but for the reflex effect produced upon England by the wonderful advancement of the American Colonies, and by their constantly expanding commerce. In the early part, however, of the reign of George the Third, causes came into operation, which were destined to lead to an immense development of our national resources. Great manufacturing inventions, extensive improvement in our internal communications, and moderated legislation with respect to corn, began to act on the condition of the country; and the union with Scotland, heretofore one of force and of statute, began to take root, on both sides provision, religious, moral, political or municipal, social or physical, had been made for them. The Church, the State, the titled landed, commercial, and labouring classes, had all departed from their former reciprocal attitudes, and no one knew either how far, or in what direction they had swerved. The argument of Mr. Macaulay, then, was in this view worse than worthless. It was, if strictly taken, to show that we might be idle now without reason, because others had from necessity been idle before us; and this, although we were suffering so deeply from the consequences of the unhappy necessity, which we were invited of our own free will to reproduce. But in truth this representation, though it may be dialectically a fair answer to an adverse rhetorician, would not be a just representation of the whole case as it stood. The Government of Lord Melbourne, with all its faults, was not in fact chargeable with legislative inaction. On the contrary, though it was defeated in many measures of importance by a powerful and determined opposition, yet it also carried many; standing second indeed in this respect to the ministry of Lord Grey, but likewise capable of bearing advantageous comparison with some other Governments, composed of the same or of kindred materials. There are indeed (so, as opponents, we may take leave to think even in the calm of after-time) great stains upon its memory; it expelled Sir R. Peel, and itself came into office, avowedly and expressly to carry measures with respect to the Irish Church, which, when they were found to be from the state of public feeling inconvenient, 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 make the accusation. Nor can even friends, we should think, 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 accumulations 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 selfdenying 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 Lord Melbourne left a wretched name. A fatality appears evermore to dog the path of Whig finance, and never was it in worse esteem than under the management of Lord Melbourne's ministry. At a 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 univer sally 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 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 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, miscellane ous 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 Com mons, which had previously been considerable, formed an altogether insignificant percentage of the first Reformed Parlia ment. In the second it was reduced to what in chemical analysis is usually deno minated a '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 politi cian, 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 dining-rooms of leaders! What noctes cænæque Deum 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 side-long 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, some-. times 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, 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 pre sent day the barometer of his hatreds has | Opposition affords a security, not to be イ 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.' い 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, self-restraint 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 to-morrow 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. 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, These In the first place, this condition of the 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 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. We 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 afect 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 organised 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 par liamentary system. An Opposition which is weak, and which therefore is not responsible, can only satisfy its natural appetencies in the idle explosions of malevolent passions, 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 |