any way likely that the result of the general election should so alter the relative position of parties as to enable them to command a majority on all measures of immediate necessity to the business of the country. We can easily imagine, that while their opponents are divided as now into so many sections, the present ministers might contrive, by submitting to a life of ingenious stratagems and consummate tact; by pushing forward such measures of reform as the country demands and all parties would concur in supporting; by carefully avoiding all questions which might evoke a general expression of hostile opinion; by postponing or putting aside all proposals on which their defeat would be a matter of certainty; by exciting and bringing into the foreground those discussions which would divide their antagonists, and throwing into the background the topics which would unite them; by attention to all complaints, by courtesy to all suggestions; by a few wise improvements which they might easily introduce into the transaction of public business, and by doing the actual work of office with judgment and despatch,-to acquire a certain small and artificial credit, and to prolong, almost indefinitely, a languid and undignified existence. There are many in the country, we believe, who even wish for such a state of things, men who look to immediate gain and disregard secondary and remote results, who have learned that concessions are most easily wrung from a feeble and tolerated government, and who set a high value on the steps towards reform, and the irrevocable admissions in favour of reform, which a Conservative administration is compelled to make in order to retain its power. They observe that a liberal party generally becomes timid and reactive when in office, and is supported by a Tory opposition in its timidity and reaction; whereas the Tory party always becomes reforming and liberal when in office, and is aided and dragged forward in its liberalizing course by the reforming opposition. Thus reform, they say, always advances faster under the rule of its enemies than of its friends. There is some truth and some wisdom in the policy of those who reason thus; but it is partial truth and a shortsighted policy. The immediate advantage is perceived; but the price at which it is purchased is kept out of sight. There is no doubt that of late years the Conservatives have always improved in office and the Whigs in opposition. But this improvement may be dearly bought by a lowering of the standard of public morality, and by a corrupt, careless, or reactionary spirit systematically pervading the distribution of appointments.

An Administration has three sets of functions to performthree classes of duties which the country expects from it,-viz., a wise general legislative policy; a skilful management of the business of the various Government departments; and a judi

Importance of a just Distribution of Patronage.

563

cious and patriotic distribution of its patronage. The importance of this last branch of ministerial duty is seldom sufficiently estimated. A Cabinet may do this well, and other matters ill. A Government may be timid and ineffective in its general action; its legislative schemes may be imperfect and ill-concocted; it may manage the official routine of administration with a somewhat lax and unpractised hand; and yet it may be preferable to its rivals, and it may be important to retain it in power, at all events for a time, because its appointments are carefully, sagaciously, and honestly made. Or the converse of this proposition may be just. It is no trifling matter whether the immense patronage of the Government-especially in the higher class of appointments-shall be in the hands of men who, whatever their feebleness or their faults, earnestly desire progress, ardently love freedom, and conscientiously endeavour to find the fittest candidates for every post;-or in the hands of men whose hearts are in the past, who dread the march of mind, who abhor all mental liberty and daring, the whole spirit of whose policy would, though unavowedly, be steadily and systematically reactionary, and whose whole weight would be thrown into the scale of absolutism, at home and abroad. It is impossible to over-estimate the gradual and silent influences of good, or bad, appointments to the episcopate, to the bench, to the magistracy, to the government of colonies, to the inspectorship of schools, to the multitude of other posts at the disposal of the Executive,-in educating, inoculating, and regenerating the nation, or the reverse. It is no slight matter that each vacancy among the bishops should be filled up by Ministers who will appoint a Stanley or a Sumner, instead of a Philpotts or a Wilberforce ;-that the many hundred livings in the gift of the Crown should be conferred on clergymen who will carry the olive-branch of peace, instead of the torch of discord, into their respective parishes, who will attach, instead of alienating, the hearts of an earnest and inquiring generation. It is no trivial question whether a flood of rational piety, or a flood of rampant Puseyism—a religion of blessing, or a religion of cursing-shall be poured, year after year, over the land. It makes no small difference whether the judges who are elevated to the bench shall be lawyers who are bigoted to every old enormity, or lawyers who are earnest in favour of every beneficent reform-men like Eldon, or men like Romilly. It is no slight matter whether the magistrates who administer justice in the first resort, shall be of a character to make the law loved and respected, or hated and despised-whether they shall be real "justices of the peace," or mere persecutors of vagrants and of poachers. In the course of a few years, the different

effects produced on the education of the people, by schoolinspectors appointed for their wide sagacity, and school-inspectors appointed only for their narrow orthodoxy, will have been incalculable. And, finally, who can pretend to estimate the mighty and contrasted consequences which would be wrought on our colonial empire, our national strength, the happiness, prosperity, and loyalty of our numerous dependencies, by a series of governors sent out by a Reforming or a Tory Adminis tration-a series of governors like Lord Dalhousie and Lord Elgin, or like Captain Fitzroy and Lord Torrington? Yet all these differences might, and to a great extent probably would, be produced by a simple change of the men who sat in Downing Street. The indirect influence of the real ingrained principles held by the members of the Cabinet, is often far greater and wider than their direct action. On this account we deprecate the continuance of the present Ministers in power.

We deprecate it, further, on the ground of public morality and Parliamentary honour, which of late years have received so many severe shocks. We have seen a Ministry come into power on the ground of the necessity of "the appropriation clause," and resign that ground after they had been a year in office. We have seen a Ministry appointed and a Parliament elected, for the object of defeating the policy of commercial freedom, and end in carrying out that policy in its fullest meaning. We have seen a third Ministry unseat its antagonists on the question of a coercion bill for Ireland, and almost immediately find themselves compelled to propose a still more stringent one themselves. And if the country now allows a fourth Ministry to retain, as free-traders, offices which they have sought and obtained as Protectionists, it will have made itself a particeps criminis, and will have given its sanction to a system discreditable now, and ominous of future evil.

There is no worse augury for a nation's welfare than the prevalence of a low tone of public morality. Nothing is a surer indication of decline; nothing a more certain presage of approaching ruin. Where great criminals are leniently dealt with, and great crimes meet only with gentle and modified condemnation; when the past, however disreputable, is readily forgiven at the first promise of an amended future; when the prodigal son is promptly and without question welcomed back, though low tastes dictated the prodigality, and flagrant selfishness alone suggested the return; when a long and obstinate persistence in wrong is held to be cancelled by a month of tardy and convenient repentance; and when all the mischief wrought by a life of error can be atoned for and blotted out by final obeisance to the majesty of truth,-there is much reason to fear

Danger of a Lax Morality among Public Men. 565

that a dangerous laxity is beginning to undermine those principles of right among statesmen and politicians which are the strongest safeguards of our national interests and honour. The idea that it is never too late to amend, and to reap the full reward of amendment, is no doubt a prodigious comfort to the frail and erring; but it is also a dreadful encouragement to the shrewd and calculating sinner to continue in his iniquity as long as the balance of immediate advantage seems to be in his favour. We can quite understand the unhesitating readiness with which all who are earnest in the pursuit of a great object will naturally hail the arrival of every recruit desirous of being enlisted in the same cause, without too close or severe an inquiry into his antecedents. We can sympathize to a great extent with the credulous cordiality which welcomes every fresh convert to our views, and thinks it ungracious to question the sincerity or the motives of the conversion. In the one case, the assistance brought to our cause, in the other, the homage paid to our doctrines, dispose us to think as well as possible of the superficial convert or the hollow ally; and in the immediate gain we are too apt to overlook and under-estimate the remote and insidious mischief. Our mistake, to use the words of Sir James Mackintosh, is that of "too readily allowing exceptions to general rules; that of too easy a permission of the use of doubtful means where the end seems to us good; that of believing, unphilosophically as well as dangerously, that there can be any scheme or measure as beneficial to the State, as the mere existence of men who would not do a base act for any public advantage."

For a long period we were too much given to idolize CONSISTENCY in our public men. Adherence to party, even when the party pursued an unprincipled course-adherence to former opinions, even when those opinions had become untenable, was long regarded as constituting the first and most sacred duty of a statesman. Change of opinion, or desertion of colleagues, was the one sin for which there was no forgiveness. A politician's obligation to his country was a tradesman's debt, which he ought to pay if he could: his obligations to his party were a debt of honour, which it was unpardonable not to discharge. Reflection and circumstances have greatly modified our feelings on this matter, and the tendency is now to run into the opposite extreme. Party ties have been so much broken up; changes of opinion have been so frequent, so serviceable, and so well defended; the education both of the nation and of statesmen has proceeded so rapidly of late, that the strangest tergiversations and conversions excite no surprise and little animadversion; and, provided only the change be in the right direction, we are too

ready to accept it as genuine and meritorious-even if it be tardy to a shameful degree, and timely to a most suspicious extent, and to pass a general act of indemnity and oblivion for all the past. We must raise our voice against this tendency, as the offspring of a lax morality, and pregnant with much future danger.

Every individual change of policy or recantation of opinion on the part of leading public men, must stand upon its own merits: of the simple fact of inconsistency little, either good or bad, can be predicated. Each case must be judged by its antecedents and its concomitants. There have been, within recent recollection, some changes so rational, so gradual, so grounded on new knowledge, wider experience, and deeper study, so justified by the purest motives and the clearest necessity, so obviously honest because attended with much mortification, and punished by severe penalties,-that we class them among the most indisputable sacrifices of patriotic virtue. Such was that of Sir Robert Peel from 1842 to 1846. And there have been some recantations, also in the right direction, but so sudden, so audacious, so utterly unbased upon any additional facts, so inexcusable on the common plea of previous want of inquiry, so apparently traceable only to the one circumstance of altered position, that it is impossible for the widest charity to elevate them into merits, or to give absolution to the subject of them. Such, it appears to us, was Mr. Disraeli's homage of adhesion to the principles and consequences of the financial policy of his antagonists, as displayed in his celebrated speech on the budget.

We can make every allowance for the case of those politicians who are born into a particular set of opinions, who inherit them from their parents, or imbibe them insensibly from their early associates. They have for years been accustomed to take for granted that their friends were right, and their adversaries wrong; they have been in the habit of hearing and repeating the stock arguments on their own side of the question, without ever dreaming of the unsoundness of them; and have never regarded the subject from their opponents' point of view. Hence, when new party combinations, or the increasing dangers of the country, compel them for the first time really to investigate matters with the single purpose of discovering the truth, and they perceive that they have all their life been unconsciously living on shallow fallacies, they are placed in a most embarrassing position. And if they candidly avow their error, we give them ready and generous absolution, approve heartily their final deviation into right, and reserve whatever blame must necessarily attach to them, for their former inconsiderateness, not for their present retractation.