political condition of Ireland, while the overwhelming majority of the Irish members are elected by small farmers and agricultural labourers who could never avail themselves of University education, and who on all matters relating to education act blindly at the dictation of their priests.

Inconsistency is no necessary condemnation of a politician, and parties as well as individual statesmen have abundantly shown it. It would lead me too far in a book in which the moral difficulties of politics form only one subdivision, to enter into the history of English parties, but those who will do so will easily convince themselves that there is hardly a principle of political action that has not in party history been abandoned, and that not unfrequently parties have come to advocate at one period of their history the very measures which at another period they most strenuously resisted. Changed circumstances, the growth or decline of intellectual tendencies, party strategy, individual influence have all contributed to these mutations, and most of them have been due to very blended motives of patriotism and self-interest.

In judging the moral quality of the changes of party leaders, the element of time will usually be of capital importance. Violent and sudden reversals of policy are never effected by a party without a great loss of moral weight; though there are circumstances under which they have been imperatively required. No one will now dispute the integrity of the motives that induced the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel to carry Catholic Emancipation in 1829, when the Clare election had brought Ireland to the verge of Revolution; and the conduct of Sir Robert Peel in carrying the repeal of the Corn Laws was certainly not due to any motive either of

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personal or party ambition, though it may be urged with force, that at a time when he was still the leader of the Protectionist party his mind had been manifestly moving in the direction of Free-trade, and that the Irish famine, though not a mere pretext, was not wholly the cause of the surrender. In each of these cases a ministry pledged to resist a particular measure, introduced and carried it, and did so without any appeal to the electors. The justification was that the measure in their eyes had become absolutely necessary to the public welfare, and that the condition of politics made it impossible for them either to carry it by a dissolution or to resign the task into other hands. Had Sir Robert Peel either resigned office or dissolved Parliament after the Clare election in 1828, it is highly probable that the measure of Catholic Emancipation could not have been carried, and its postponement, in his belief, would have thrown Ireland into a dangerous rebellion. Few greater misfortunes have befallen party government than the failure of the Whigs to form a ministry in 1845. Had they done so, as Sir Robert Peel unquestionably desired, the abolition of the Corn Laws would have been carried by statesmen who were in some measure supported by the Free-trade party, and not by statesmen who had obtained their power as the special representatives of the agricultural interests.

Another case which in a party point of view was more successful, but which should in my opinion be much more severely judged, was the Reform Bill of 1867. The Conservative party, under the guidance of Mr. Disraeli, defeated Mr. Gladstone's Reform Bill mainly on the ground that it was an excessive step in the direction of Democracy. The victory placed them in office and they

then declared that, as the question had been raised, they must deal with it themselves. They introduced a Bill carrying the suffrage to a much lower point than that which the late Government had proposed, but they surrounded it with a number of provisions securing additional representation for particular classes and interests which would have materially modified its democratic character.

But for these safeguarding provisions the party would certainly not have tolerated the introduction of such a measure, yet in the face of opposition their leader dropped them one by one as of no capital importance, and by a leadership which was a masterpiece of unscrupulous adroitness succeeded in inducing his party to carry a measure far more democratic than that which they had a few months before denounced and defeated. It was argued that the question must be settled; that it must be placed on a permanent and lasting basis; that it must no longer be suffered to be a weapon in the hands of the Whigs, and that the Tory Reform Bill, though it was acknowledged to be a leap in the dark,' had at least the result of 'dishing the Whigs.' There is little doubt that it was in accordance with the genuine convictions of Disraeli. He belonged to a school of politics of which Bolingbroke, Carteret and Shelburne, and, in some periods of his career, Chatham were earlier representatives who had no real sympathy with the preponderance of the aristocratic element in the old Tory party, who had a decided disposition to appeal frankly to democratic support, and who believed that a strong executive resting on a broad democratic basis was the true future of Toryism. He anticipated to a remarkable degree the school of political thought which has triumphed in our own day, though he

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did not live to witness its triumph. At the same time it cannot be denied that the Reform Bill of 1867 in the form in which it was ultimately carried was as far as possible from the wishes and policy of his party in the beginning of the session, and as inconsistent as any policy could be with their language and conduct in the session that preceded it.

The

A parliamentary government chosen on the party system is, as we have seen, at once the trustee of the whole nation, bound as such to make the welfare of the whole its supreme end, and also the special representative of particular classes, the special guardian of their interests, aims, wishes, and principles. two points of view are not the same, and grave difficulties, both ethical and political, have often to be encountered in endeavouring to harmonise them. It is, of course, not true that a party object is merely a matter of place or power, and naturally a different thing from a patriotic object. The very meaning of party is that public men consider certain principles of government, certain lines of policy, the protection and development of particular interests of capital importance to the nation, and they are therefore on purely public grounds fully justified in making it a main object to place the government of the country in the hands of their party. The importance, however, of maintaining a particular party in power varies greatly. In many, probably in most, periods of English history a change of government means no violent or farreaching alteration in policy. It means only that one set of tendencies in legislation will for a time be somewhat relaxed, and another set somewhat intensified; that the interests of one class will be somewhat more and those of another class somewhat less attended to; that the rate

of progress or change will be slightly accelerated or retarded. Sometimes it means even less than this. Opinions on the two front benches are so nearly assimilated that a change of government principally means the removal for a time from office of ministers who have made some isolated administrative blunders or incurred some individual unpopularity quite apart from their party politics. It means that ministers who are jaded and somewhat worn out by several years' continuous work, and of whom the country had grown tired, are replaced by men who can bring fresher minds and energies to the task; that patronage in all its branches having for some years gone mainly to one party, the other party are now to have their turn. There are periods when the country is well satisfied with the general policy of a government but not with the men who carry it on. Ministers of excellent principles prove inefficient, tactless, or unfortunate, or quarrels and jealousies arise among them, or difficult negotiations are going on with foreign nations which can be best brought to a successful termination if they are placed in the hands of fresh men, unpledged and unentangled by their past. The country wants a change of government but not a change of policy, and under such circumstances the task of a victorious opposition is much less to march in new directions than to mark time, to carry on the affairs of the nation on the same lines, but with greater administrative skill. In such periods the importance of party objects is much diminished and a policy which is intended merely to keep a party in power should be severely condemned.

Sometimes, however, it happens that a party has committed itself to a particular measure which its opponents believe to be in a high degree dangerous, or even ruinous to the country. In that case it becomes a matter of