that the cards were packed in favour of the Unionist. The Liberal late member had disgusted his constituents by leaving them after he had secured for himself legal promotion and before he had secured for his ploughmen electors the statutory half-holiday which they covet much more than Home Rule. The Liberal candidate was a stockbroker from London. The Unionist candidate was the representative of Lord Dalhousie, commanding all the support naturally given to a landlord as liberal and generous as the late Earl, and pledged moreover to a programme more Radical than that of most Ministerialists. Free trout fishing, Mr. Chamberlain's social programme, a wide and liberal measure of local government for Ireland, and Home Rule for Scotland so far as to have all Scotch business transacted at the Scotch capital these things made up an attractive programme and secured the defeat of the Liberal interloper by 286 votes, where Sir John Rigby had previously been elected by a majority of 866. Hence deep dismay and grave searchings of heart in the Liberal ranks. for the Liberals. He was the tried and trusted chief of the staff at the party headquarters, a post for which he had every qualification but one. That defect, not noticed when he was in the saddle, tells heavily against the party to-day. He trained no successor. He had assistants, and another man now sits in his sanctum; but there is no Schnadhorst II. And therein the Liberals suffer a grievous injury which will cost them many seats at the General Election. The need for insisting upon these things Mr. Asquith's is that nothing but the prospect of 66 'faux pas." imminent disaster will keep in check the fatal centrifugal tendencies of the Ministerialist horde. It is perhaps only fit and proper that Mr. Labouchere and his solitary fidus Achates should do their level best to render impossible a union of the Menders and Enders by proclaiming aloud their irreconcilable hostility to mending in any shape or form; but the public heard with some amazement Mr. Asquith speaking at Birmingham in terms which made the cynic shrug his shoulders and the honest Liberal hang his head in despair. There is no chance of victory if Cabinet Ministers go out of their way to advertise to the country that the Ministry is a house divided against itself. Lord Rosebery's position is one of extraordinary difficulty. The task before the party can only be accomplished by union and discipline, and it is disheartening indeed when those who should lead the assault upon the outworks waste their energies in discussing how the citadel shall be attacked after the outworks have been won. The People or the Peers? The tactical advantage of going to the country on the issue whether the nation should be governed by the People or the Peers, is that it forces the electors to face the unpleasant prospect of placing the Empire under the rule of the Peers till the close of the century. The Liberals have to play double or quits in the hope that the danger of enormously increasing the power of the aristocracy may drive a recalcitrant democracy into their camp. This of course is an advantage, inasmuch as it transfers the controversy from the past to the future, and enables Liberals to avoid inconvenient admissions as to the constitutional and moral justification which the Peers can plead for throwing out the Home Rule Bill. Justin McCarthy could be shut up like a jury without fire, food, or drink until they arrived at an agreement by which they could spike the Unionists' chief argument. That is based upon the rooted conviction that the Irish are a race afflicted, as by some strange curse, with an utter lack of that political common sense which finds expression in the give and take of sensible compromise, without which self-government is impossible. At present there is but small sign of any movement in this direction. The Parnellites, whose object it seems to be to borrow, even from the charnel-house of death, Our One Chance. The Independent Labour Party shows no diminution of its zeal in the cause of Liberal disunion. Putting all these things together, it requires no prophetic eye to see that nothing but the most extraordinary patience and pluck on the part of Lord Rosebery can give the Liberals even a fair show at the polls. Patience, however, the first quality, as Peel declared, that is needed by a British Premier, Lord Rosebery possesses, and pluck also of the North British kind. His speeches at Glasgow and at the Lord Mayor's banquet poison with which to envenom the weapons of political controversy, quote the Duke of Devonshire's speech at Barnstaple as a justification for prolonging the present anarchy of faction among Irish patriots. The Duke said : We can offer to the people of Ireland their full share of all those reforms, political or social, which we think a wider knowledge of the wants of the people and a fuller sympathy have brought into our view. This, it is argued, may mean that Ireland will receive local self-government from the hands of the Unionists. If the Irish prefer a Local Government Bill to Home Rule, no doubt this may come true. But do they? That is for the Parnellites to decide. [November 17, 1894. have deepened the respect with which the young Premier is regarded even by those who differ from him. They were sinewy, straightforward and eloquent appeals to the massive common sense of the great public. They showed the more serious side of a statesman whose wit has sometimes so dazzled observers that they mistook what were flashes from the depths of the volcano for the fitful and uncertain gleam of summer lightning. That mistake will not survive this autumn, and that more accurate appreciation of the fighting force of Lord Rosebery is one of the most palpable advantages of the Recess. The The most remarkable event of the last Republican month has been the phenomenal and United States. almost unprecedented collapse of the Democratic party at the November Elections in the United States. There is sufficient semblance between the position of President Cleveland and Lord Rosebery to make the catastrophe echo unpleasantly on this side the Atlantic. President Cleveland, like Lord Rosebery, reigns over a divided party, which two years ago obtained a majority in the Lower House by a programme which resembled the Newcastle Programme in being far in advance of anything that the Upper House would pass. For Home Rule read Tariff for revenue only, for the Solid South the South and West of Ireland, and for Populists the Independent Labour Party--and we can figure out pretty clearly how the land lies. If Lord Rosebery had consented to pass some kind of a Local Government Bill for Ireland framed by the majority in the House of Lords instead of insisting on Home Rule, he would have been where President Cleveland found himself when the polls closed. The Democratic party was simply snowed under by the ballot papers of the Republicans. The House of Representatives, which had a majority of ninety-one Democrats over the Republicans, will be replaced by a House with a Republican majority of ninety. In the Northern States the Republicans have wiped out their Democratic adversaries. It is one of the greatest landslides of modern politics. Explanations of the Many causes can be raked together to explain the overturn, but before the polls Elections. opened all of them together were not expected by the closest observers to produce such a sweeping result. The first and by far the greatest contributing cause was the fact that the times were bad. Employment was scarce, wages were falling, farmers were starving. The country has been traversed by armies of out o' works, and all these evils could be directly traced in part to the prolonged uncertainty about the tariff. Protectionists and Free Traders agreed in blaming the administration, the former for meddling with the subject at all, the latter for their lack of decision and thoroughness, so it came to pass the sovereign people rose in its might and made a clean sweep of the Democratic candidates. The sovereign people did this all the more emphatically because, owing to the safeguards against popular passion devised by the Constitution builders, the voting changes nothing for a year to come. Not until the beginning of 1896 will the Republican majority have the chance to legis late. Under such safeguards, the sovereign people feels that the November polls are little more than an opportunity of saying Damn! This year it certainly said Damn! very loudly. After the irritation at the bad times, the division in the Democratie ranks, due to personal differences between Cleveland and Hill, and the scandalous corruption revealed in New York under the Democratic sway of Tammany, had most to do with the result. The Anti-Papal || Association claim that in routing out the Catholics they incidentally gave the victory to the Republicans, and, preposterous as their claim may be, it is to be feared that Protestant bigotry played some part in the Republican victory. At home the most notable electoral London School Board result has been that achieved at the Election. London School Board Election. The contest was prosecuted with unusual acrimony on both sides. Churchmen maligned Nonconformists as Atheists, and Nonconformists discredited a good cause by making party capital out of the private devotions of Mr. Athelstan Riley, whom they regarded as a Romanist in disguise. The cdium theologicum. however, usually bears these poisonous fruits. The real and the only important issue from a practical point of view was not theological but educational. The Denominationalists had starved the Board schools lest they should compete at an advantage with the schools of the Church. That policy of the Stingy Stepmother was the accursed thing against which the indignation of the citizens was directed, not against the Mariolatry of Mr. Riley or the Trinitarianism of the Circular. The result was unexpectedly favourable for the opponents of the Church Party. The Progressives polled a clear plurality of 135,000 votes, representing a majority of some 30,000 voters. East and South of London gave a heavy majority for the Progressives. The strength of the Moderates | lay in the wealthy voters of the City, Westminster. So decisive a victory at Chelsea, and Kensington. The as nominated twenty-eight-sufficient to give them a majority of one if every candidate was elected, relying upon the return of a sufficient number of Labour or Socialist candidates to make up for any casualties among the Progressives. But often happens in a severe contest, the forces of gravitation proved irresistible. Citizens who might in ordinary times have voted for independent candidates, rallied to the regular party ticket when they got interested in the main issue. As the result the independent candidates got left every time. The cumulative vote, which was invented to give representation to minorities, left the Labour, Socialist, and Catholic groups without a solitary representative on the Board. The system of proportional representation, advocated as an ideal plan for apportioning seats in exact proportion to the number of the voters, worked out in practice so as to give a majority of the seats to the minority of the voters. The advocates of proportional representation will find it will take many elaborate essays to remove the prejudice which the result of the School Board Election has left in the public mind against the cumulative vote. Other Elections. The The School Board Elections in London School Board were immediately preceded by similar elections in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Rochdale, and Salford, and followed by others in Bradford, Gateshead, and Sheffield. The results call for little remark, the status quo being left on the whole unchanged. Here and there two seats would be lost or gained, but substantially the balance of parties remains as before. The attempt to run Labour candidates met with very partial success. Labour Party won two seats from the Church Party at Rochdale, and one from the Progressives at Salford. None of their candidates were elected at Liverpool, Manchester, or Birmingham. The most notable feature in these elections was the return of Mr. Anstell, the representative of the Teachers' Association, at the head of the poll at Birmingham. Mr. Anstell polled 146,000 votes out of a total of 390,508, polling actually more than the total, 121,488, which returned the whole Liberal eight! The next highest poll was 33,329. If the Birmingham teachers had run a teachers' Eight and distributed Mr. Anstell's votes they might have had a majority on the Board. In West Lambeth Mr. Macnamara, the teachers' candidate, polled the heaviest vote cast in London, viz., 48,255. The advent of the teacher as a force in School Board politics is a new and somewhat significant feature of these elections. The Teacher in Politics. The teachers if they please can without much difficulty elect the School Boards. They have the confidence of the parents. They are closer to the electors than any politicians, and, if they choose to follow Mr. Macnamara and Mr. Anstell, they can oust both Progressives and Denominationalists, and run our Elementary Schools to suit themselves. Mr. Bryce adverted to another phase of this question when speaking at Clerkenwell on education in citizenship In view of the ever-increasing duties of citizens in the exercise of their several franchises, the function of the teachers became one of the most important in the State. There had been countries where almost everything depended upon the teachers. In Bulgaria, after the Turks were driven out, this class became the most important in the community. The teachers became the Ministers and administrators of the country and had enjoyed ever since a large share in its government. Again, in Germany in her dark period between the great peace in 1815 and the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848. it was by the German professors that the torch of freedom was kept alive and the dream of a revived Germany cherished. In this country the elementary teachers would have much to do in moulding the future citizens of the country. It would be their duty to cultivate these principal qualities in their pupils. First, intelligence to appreciate the real issues before them; secondly, independence of all sinister influences, whether of employer, or of political organisation, or even of spiritual adviser. Above all, the voter should take care that the controller of the organisation should not "boss" it, as the Americans said. The third quality was interest and earnestness. Of one thing we may be quite sure. The policy of the Stingy Stepmother will never command the enthusiasm of the teachers. The Parish Councils Act. The excitement caused by the School Board Elections has to some extent dwarfed the interest in the pending elections for vestries, guardians and parish councils. This enormous number of elections all occurring simultaneously puts the practical sagacity of our democracy to a somewhat ruder test than any to which it has hitherto been exposed. Our democracy is raw, and it is inevitable that many blunders should be made, say, in the choice of the five thousand men and women who are to be elected as vestrymen in Greater London. In time we shall be prepared for it, no doubt. But this year we have nothing to show like the organisation which exists in American cities. In Chicago last month, on the morning of the elections, an army of no fewer than 16,000 Democrats mustered at dawn, and were told off in squads of 20 to each of the 800 polling places in the city. The Republicans would have about as many. So that the rival parties had an army of 30,000 men actually engaged in polling about 300,000 electors. The pro |