to arbitrary power. The very phrase has now an archaic sound; but when it was originally coined it expressed a very real and threatening danger.-Lord John Russell.

European reformers have been accustomed to see the numerical majority everywhere unjustly depressed, everywhere trampled upon, or at the best overlooked, by governments; nowhere possessing power enough to extort redress of their most positive grievances, provision for their mental culture, or even to prevent themselves from being taxed avowedly for the pecuniary profit of the ruling classes. To see these things, and to seek to put an end to them, by means (among other things) of giving more political power to the majority, constitutes Radicalism.-John Stuart Mill.

The ideal of the Liberal party consists in a view of things undisturbed and undistorted by the promptings of interests or prejudice, in a complete independence of all class interests, and in relying for its success on the better feelings and higher intelligence of mankind.-Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke).

The passion for improving mankind in its ultimate object does not vary. But the immediate object of refor mers and the forms of persuasion by which they seek to advance them vary much in different generations. To a hasty observer they might even seem contradictory and to justify the notion that nothing better than a desire for change, selfish or perverse, is at the bottom of all reforming movements. Only those who will think a little longer about it can discern the same old cause of social good against class interests, for which, under altered names, Liberals are fighting now as they were fifty years ago.— T. H. Green.

The Manchester School was essentially a middle class school. The Radicals had nothing in common except their Radicalism. The Manchester men were almost all of that sober, clear-headed, independent class, often sadly wanting in gracefulness and culture, but always amply endowed with courage, enterprise and common sense, which has built up the cotton industry of Lancashire. They were not democratic in any theoretical sense. They cared nothing either for aristocracy or democracy. They were accustomed to mix. on terms of equality with men of all classes, and their estimate of a man's worth was always their own, and depended on nothing but his capacity.-W. Lyon Blease.

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CHAPTER XVIII.

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DISRAELI AND CONSERVATISM.

HE passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 made so substantial an alteration in the political organisation of Great Britain that not only did the Whig party drop its name and become Liberal, but even Tories, with all their aversion to change, blossomed out as Conservatives. The Bill, it must be remembered remodelled a system which had existed unchanged for centuries. The elder Pitt had described it as corrupt in the middle of the eighteenth century, and his son had endeavoured to reform. it towards the close of that century, but it had continued with its rotten boroughs, its Eatanswill political debauchery, its bribery, and its caricature of representation until it was washed away in a current of indignation.

The Tories had exhausted the resources of ingenuity and eloquence in defence of this decrepit system, but in vain. It seemed to many among them, now that it had fallen, that the name of the party which had tried to maintain it was touched with the discredit which attached to the memory of the old régime. It was not sound politics immediately after 1832 to bear the label of Tory. So the new name, Conservative, was employed instead. John Wilson Croker, the Tory writer whom Macaulay so mercilessly castigated for his "ill-compiled, ill-arranged, illwritten and ill-printed" edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, saw the change coming, and suggested the adoption of the new party name in a Quarterly Review article in 1830. He there spoke of "the Tory, which might with more propriety be called the Conservative, party." Sir Robert Peel adopted the designation after the Reform Bill was carried.

There is, however, this difference between the adoption of new names for the old Whig and Tory parties-that whereas Whiggism went out altogether and the name ceased

to have much more than historical interest attaching to it, there was after a time a revival of the Tory name. The Conservative has, as it were, an eye at the back of his head, with which he sees the past with a glamour about it; and, as the discredit of defending the pre-Reform Bill abuses became toned down by time, there were some among the Conservatives who turned to the old name with some affection; so that in 1882 we find Matthew Arnold writing of "the Conservatives, or, as they are now beginning to be called again, the Tories."

That statement and its date are interesting, for in 1881 had died Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, who became the real leader of the Conservative party after Peel fell from grace by repealing the Corn Laws. Conservatism, then-which was Toryism "camouflaged," as we say nowadays, under a name which seemed more respectable for a while came in under Peel about 1832, and was the political name of the party which Disraeli led down to the eve of 1882. More recent Conservative leaders have frequently preferred the old name. Lord Randolph Churchill nearly always spoke of the Tory, very rarely of the Conservative, party.

The ascent of Disraeli to the leadership of the British Conservatives was surely one of the most extraordinary occurrences in modern politics. His Jewish origin was a detriment to him, though his father had abandoned Judaism and become a member of the Church of England; for at the time when he first secured a place in Parliament (1837), the prejudice against the Hebrew people so far continued that a Jew could not take his seat unless he pronounced an oath "on the true faith of a Christian," and this restriction continued till 1858. When he was first designated for high office Queen Victoria wrote that she was "a little shocked," which probably meant that her consort, Prince Albert, with his German anti-Semitic bias, had expressed disapproval to her. Moreover, Disraeli had no aristocratic connections, no such University distinction as helped Gladstone in the beginning of his political career, no powerful friends in the forefront of politics; and he created some amount of distrust of himself by his glossy and overdecorated dandyism, his affectations of speech and manner, his catch-penny rhetoric. There was also the handicap that