Will it be too audacious to submit to the Prophet of the new Locksley Hall that the laws and works of the half-century he reviews are not bad but good?

I will refer as briefly as may be to the sphere of legislation. Slavery has been abolished. A criminal code, which disgraced the Statute Book, has been effectually reformed. Laws of combination and contract, which prevented the working population from obtaining the best price for their labour, have been repealed. The lamentable and demoralising abuses of the Poor Law have been swept away. Lives and limbs, always exposed to destruction through the incidents of labour, formerly took their chance, no man heeding them, even when the origin of the calamity lay in the recklessness or neglect of the employer: they are now guarded by preventive provisions, and the loss is mitigated, to the sufferers or their survivors, by pecuniary compensation. The scandals of labour in mines, factories, and elsewhere, to the honour, first and foremost, of the name of Shaftesbury, have been either removed, or greatly qualified and reduced. The population on the sea coast is no longer forced wholesale into contraband trade by fiscal follies; and the Game Laws no longer constitute a plausible apology for poaching. The entire people have good schools placed within the reach of their children, and are put under legal obligation to use the privilege, and contribute to the charge. They have also at their doors the means of husbanding their savings, without the compromise of their independence by the inspection of the rector or the squire, and under the guarantee of the State to the uttermost farthing of the amount. Living in a land where severance in families is almost a matter of course, they are no longer barred from feeding and sustaining domestic affection by prohibitory rates of postage, sternly imposed upon the masses, while the peers and other privileged classes were exempt through franking from the charge. In this establishment of cheap communications, England has led the world. Information through a free press, formerly cut off from them by stringent taxation, is now at their easy command. The taxes which they pay are paid to the State for the needful purposes of government, and nowhere to the wealthy classes of the community for the purpose of enhancing the prices of the articles produced for their account. Their interests at large are protected by their votes; and their votes are protected by the secrecy which screens them from intimidation either through violence or in its subtler forms. Their admission into Parliament, through the door opened by abolishing the property qualification, has been accomplished on a scale which,

• Among the humanising contrivances of the age, I think notice is due to the system founded by Mr. Cook, and now largely in use, under which numbers of persons, and indeed whole classes, have for the first time found easy access to foreign countries, and have acquired some of that familiarity with them, which breeds not contempt but kindness.

whether sufficient or not, has been both sensible, and confessedly beneficial. Upon the whole, among the results of the last halfcentury to them are, that they work fewer hours; that for these reduced hours they receive increased wages; and that with these increased wages they purchase at diminished rates almost every article, except tobacco and spirits, of which the price can be affected by the acts of the Legislature.

It seems to me that some grounds have already been laid for a verdict of acquittal upon the public performances of the half-century. The question now touched upon is that condition of England question' on which Mr. Carlyle, about midway in his life, thundered in our ears his not unwarrantable but menacing admonitions. Some heed, it would appear, has been given to such pleading. Science and legislation have been partners in a great work. There is no question now about the shares of their respective contributions. It is enough for my purpose that the work has been done, and that the Legislature has laboured hard in it. Mr. Giffen, in a treatise of great care and ability, has estimated the improvement in the condition of the working population at 50 per cent. Would that it might be possible to add another fifty. But an accomplished fact of this character and magnitude is surely matter for thankfulness, acknowledgment, and hope. The discord between the people and the law is now at an end, and our institutions are again' broad-based 'upon national conviction and affection.

I turn to another great category of contention. It is in the nature of religious disabilities to die hard. Stirred at a sore point into spasmodic action in the Parliament of 1880, they are now practically dead. The signs of inequality obtruded upon Nonconformists by the Church Rate, and by the unequal laws of marriage, and of registration upon births and burials, have been put away. In just satisfaction to a civil right, free access has been given to the churchyards of the country; and the sinister predictions which obstructed the change have proved to be at least as shadowy as the beings commonly supposed to haunt those precincts. The old universities have opened wide their august portals to the entire community; and they have more than doubled the numbers of their students. If the Oath is not now universally revered, at least a great provocation to irreverence in the needless and perfunctory use of it has been carefully removed.

It would be endless to recite all the cases in which relief has been afforded, during the period under review, to suffering industry and imperilled capital. One case at least must not be left wholly without notice. The farmers of the country have suffered for a series of years with their landlords, but usually beyond their landlords, and from causes which it is not altogether easy to trace. The law cannot give prosperity; but it can remove grievance. By changes in the

law, the occupiers of the soil have been saved from the ravages (such they often were) of ground game. In the repeal of the Malt Tax there has disappeared what had been commonly proclaimed to be their heaviest wrong. The tithe-owner, clerical or lay, no longer abstracts the tenth sheaf, which may often have represented the whole nett value of an improvement. Claims of the landlord for the recovery of rent, which were found to operate unjustly (I refer particularly to the law of hypothec in Scotland) have been abolished. And more than all these, the title of the farmer to the fruit of his legitimate investments in his holding has, though only a few years back, obtained efficient protection.

Long as is this list, it is not less incomplete than long. Two or three of its gaps must be filled up. The new and stringent Act for the reduction of the expenses of Parliamentary elections is both a law for virtue against vice of the most insinuating kind, and a law for the free popular choice of representatives as against the privilege and monopoly of the rich. Women have been admitted to new public duties, which they have proved their perfect capacity to discharge, and their property and earnings in the married state have been protected. Prying for a moment into a hidden corner of the Statute Book, I remind the reader that at the date of the first Locksley Hall no woman could by law obtain the slightest aid towards the support of an illegitimate child, wherever the father was a soldier. This shameful enactment has been abolished. The members of the two Houses of Parliament used to find in that membership a cover from the payment of their lawful debts. This shelter they have lost. The application of the elective principle to municipal corporations has advanced our towns to a higher civilisation, and has exhibited in many instances, of which Mr. Chamberlain is the most brilliant and famous name, the capacity of local government to develop the political faculty, and confer imperial education. The repeal of the Navigation Laws was effected in 1849, amidst a howl of prophecies that it would be found to have involved not merely the destruction of a harassed interest,' but the downfall of our national defence. The result of the new law, in combination with the great change in shipbuilding from wood to iron, was that the 'harassed interest' has been strengthened, a noble art improved, the character of the service refined and reformed, the tonnage multiplied, and a new position given to Great Britain as the first among the shipbuilding countries of the world. If we look now to the vital subject of the relations between the two Islands, we come on the brink of controversies I would rather avoid; and I do not forget that there is one epoch of our history with which the names of Pitt and Fox and Burke and every statesman of their day are alike associated, but which as yet we have not rivalled. Drawing comparisons only from the time that followed 1782 and 1783, I venture to assert that

only since 1829, and chiefly within the latter part of this period, has Right begun, though with a chequered history, manfully to assert itself against Wrong, in the management and government of Ireland.

This work of legislation, so vast and so varied, has been upon the whole an impartial work. Many and many a time, not only have its promoters had to face powerful and obstinate opposition, but they have not been cheered in their work by the public opinion of the moment, and have had their faith and patience exercised by reliance only on the future. And it has been seen in strengthening police and prison discipline, in legislation for public order, and in the radical reformation of the poor laws, that unpopular as well as popular work has been done, and well done, when it came to hand.

And the wholesome breath of the nation has, during this period, purified not only the legislative but the administrative atmosphere. Let me record to the honour of Lord Liverpool a great practical reform. He dealt a deadly blow at the fatal mischief of Parliamentary influence in the departmental promotions of the Civil Service, by placing them under the respective Heads. Sir Robert Peel, as I knew him, was a thorough and inflexible practical reformer. Sir James Graham was a true genius of administration. I look upon the quarter of a century preceding the Crimean War as the best period of all our history with regard to economy, purity and administrative energy. But there were very great subjects, then scarcely touched, on which only the alatus of the nation could dissipate the hostile forces of profession and of clique. Good work was being done in many ways; but it required time. We had had the press-gang used at discretion as the ultimate instrument of supplying men, when wanted, for the Navy: incredible, but true. It is now a thing of the past. We had flogging as the standing means of maintaining the discipline of the Army, and destroying the selfrespect of the soldier. Despite professional authority, which in certain classes of question is the worst of guides, the profane hands of uninstructed reformers have pulled this Dagon to the ground, and he has shivered into splinters. The Government at its discretion, opened, when it chose to see cause, letters confided to the Post Office. This bad practice has died out. The officers of the Army were introduced and promoted by Purchase; and that system, under which at one time the Duke of Wellington so desponded as to military promotion that he wished for a commissionership in a revenue department, made the business of supplying brains for the Army the property of the long purses of the country. The Parliamentary defenders of the system, which involved the daily practice of patent and gross illegality, held their ground with a persistency which would have been worthy even of the British officer in the field. But it was swept away by an act of the Executive; the Army became the nation's army, and what was done in vindication

of the law has received a splendid vindication in point of policy from a conspicuous and vast advance in military efficiency since the date of the great Army reforms. So also in the Civil establishments of the country. The members of the House of Commons have freely given up their respective shares of the patronage, which the friends of each successive Administration habitually exercised through the Treasury; and a wide career of unequalled security, with emoluments undoubtedly liberal for the average of good service, and with the moral certainty of fair play in promotion, has been opened to character and talent throughout the land without distinction of class.

If, now, we look to what has happened oversea, and to our country's share in it, the view is in many respects satisfactory, and the period is in all remarkable. I speak with respect of the East India Company, and with a deep admiration of the Statesmen who were reared under its shade. The transfer of the government of the vast dominion in 1858 was not an unmingled good. But upon the whole it was the letting in of a flood of light upon a shadowed region. If since that time evil things have been done, it has not been at the instigation or with the sanction of the country. The Company had the merits and the faults of a conservative institution. The new feeling and new methods towards the natives are such as humanity rejoices in. They are due to the nation, and are intimately associated with the legislative change. It is no small matter if, though much may yet remain to do, progress has been made in the discharge of a debt, where the creditors are two hundred and fifty millions of our fellow-creatures, each of them with a deep and individual concern. With respect, again, to the great and ever-growing Colonial Empire of the Queen, the change has been yet more marked. Before Lord Grey's Reform Act, Colonies were governed in and from Downing Street. An adherence to the methods then in use would undoubtedly before this time have split the Empire. The substitution of government from within for government from without has brought all difficulties within manageable bounds, and has opened a new era of content which is also consolidation.

But the period has also been a great period for Europe. The Treaty of Vienna, in the main, had consecrated with solemn forms a great process of reaction, and had trampled under foot every national aspiration. The genius of Mr. Canning moved upon far other lines: and his efforts, especially in Portugal and Greece, made preparation for a better day, and for the vigorous action of his disciple Lord Palmerston. Nationalities have suffered, and in some places suffer still. But if we compare this with other periods of history, never have they had such a golden age. Belgium set free, Germany consolidated, Portugal and Spain assisted in all such efforts as they have made for free government, Italy reconstituted, Hungary replaced in the enjoyment of its historic rights, Greece enlarged by the addition of the