or that a pickpocket was a useful and patriotic member of society.

Let me not be understood as objecting to the existence of party spirit in politics. I think it is neither possible nor desirable that party spirit should be eliminated from politics, or from anything else. By party I mean a body of men who are bound together by common views, principles or policy. No great reform was ever carried without party organization, because in every country there is an inert mass of humanity who are opposed to all change whatsoever, and who can only be moved by the united and persistent efforts of the party of progress. But once the policy of a party has been carried there is no longer a reason for the existence of the party, which should therefore be dissolved. There is a wide distinction between a party which exists solely as the advocate of certain principles, and a party which subordinates all principles to office. Unfortunately the two great political parties in the English Parliament belong to the latter category. Neither of them has ever been distinguished for honesty of purpose, or for strict adherence to any principles. Both of them, on the contrary, have made themselves notorious by their fickleness, by their greed of office, and by their unscrupulous use of means to attain it. They have been trimmers and time-servers; they have been

everything by turns and nothing long. If they have supported a good cause it has generally been from a bad motive. They are ready to advocate one set of principles to-day and another to-morrow, if by so doing they may hope to trip up their opponents. At the beginning of the last century the Tories were in favour of short Parliaments, and the Whigs supported the Septennial Act. At the same period the Tories were in favour of the Place Bills and the Pension Bills, and the Whigs were opposed to them and to every measure which tended to restrict the corrupting influence of the government. In the eighteenth century the Whigs carried the penal laws against the Catholics, and the Tories opposed them. In the nineteenth century the Whigs abolished the same laws, and the Tories strenuously opposed their abolition. In 1711 the Tories swamped the House of Lords by the creation of peers, a proceeding which the Whigs strongly condemned; in 1832 the Whigs threatened to do the same thing in order to carry their Reform Bill, and the Tories professed to be horrified at the bare proposal. The Tories advocated and the Whigs opposed free trade at the peace of Utrecht; the Tories opposed and the Whigs advocated free trade at the time of the corn law agitation. Mr. Pitt denounced and overturned the government of Mr. Fox chiefly because it was a coalition, and imme

diately proceeded to form a coalition ministry of his own.1 In 1859 Mr. Disraeli introduced a Reform Bill and Lord John Russell managed to defeat it because it did not go far enough; the same year Lord John Russell brought in a Reform Bill, and Mr. Disraeli opposed it because it went too far. At the beginning of last year (1880) the Conservatives (being in office) assured us that Lords Beaconsfield and Salisbury had placed England at the head of the nations by the Treaty of Berlin; at the end of the same year the Conservatives (being out of office) assailed Mr. Gladstone with the coarsest abuse because he had pressed Turkey to submit to this same treaty. In the same year the Duke of Argyle and others of his recent colleagues (being out of office) assailed Lord Salisbury and the Conservative government for sacrificing the

1 Speaker Onslow relates a conversation he had with Walpole, on the subject of the king's (George II.) partiality for his Hanoverian subjects, which shows the lengths to which party feeling ran in his day. "A little while before Sir R. Walpole's fall," he writes, "and as a popular act to save himself (for he went very unwillingly out of his offices and power) he took me one day aside and said: 'What will you say, Speaker, if this hand of mine shall bring a message to the House of Commons declaring his consent to having any of his family after his own death to be made by Act of Parliament incapable of inheriting and enjoying the crown and possessing the electoral dominions at the same time?' My answer was: 'Sir, it will be a message from heaven.' He replied, 'It will be done;' but it was not done, and I have good reason to believe it would have been opposed and rejected at this time because it came from him, and by the means of those who had always been most clamorous for it."-Cox's Walpole, vol. ii. pp. 571, 572.

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interests of India to those of Lancashire in the matter of the cotton duties; immediately on acceding to office, Lord Hartington, speaking on behalf of all his colleagues (not excluding the Duke of Argyle) in reply to a deputation of Lancashire manufacturers, stated that the government were determined to abolish all which Lord Salisbury had left of the import duties on cotton. The conduct of neither of the two great parties in the State appears to have been regulated by any principle whatever. Their politics changed with the hour and the opportunity. What one party approved of the other opposed; whatever action one party took the other condemned. If the Whigs were in office and brought in a measure, the Tories would oppose it as a matter of course; if the Tories succeeded to office and brought in a similar measure on the same subject, the Whigs would pronounce it to be utterly worthless. And their successors follow precisely the same course. With Liberals and Conservatives alike everything is fair in party warfare. Truth, honour, and fair dealing are alike sacrificed to the exigencies of party. The end justifies the means, according to the ethics of either party, and the supreme end of both parties is to secure or maintain possession of the treasury benches.1

1 The following description of how the system of party government is worked in the interest of the great governing families is amusing, as coming from a Conservative party journal :

"No game of whist in one of the lordly clubs of St. James's Square

Government by Party is of a comparatively recent date. It was the outcome of a long series of corrupt Parliaments dating back from the Restoration. There is no trace of its existence till after the Revolution, and it was not till long after that event that it was organized as it now is. Macaulay tells us that political parties had their origin in the Long Parliament. It is true that there were two political parties in the Long Parliament, and that is all that can be said on the matter. They were not parties in the sense understood by the term at the present day. They were not organizations for the mere purpose of securing or holding office. The parties of that day had not become mere place-hunters. Previous to the Revolution the sovereigns of England chose their ministers on personal grounds alone, and often in defiance of Parliament. The king's ministers were the king's friends. William III. was the

was more exclusively played. It was simply a question whether his Grace of Bedford would be content with a half or a quarter of the cabinet; or whether the Marquis of Rockingham would be satisfied with the two-fifths, or whether the Earl of Shelbourne would have all, or share his Power with the Duke of Portland. In those barterings and borrowings we never hear of the name of the nation; no whisper announces that there is such a thing as the people; nor is there any allusion, in its embroidered conclave, to its interests, feelings and necessities. All was done as in an assemblage of a higher race of beings, calmly carving out the world for themselves, a tribe of Epicurean deities with the cabinet for their Olympus."-Blackwood's Magazine, No. 350, p. 754.