TOW is it that Lord Palmerston

How is it ong? How has it come

is about that he surpasses Peel and almost equals Pitt in the extent and apparent solidity of his power? He rests on the whole nation. The whole people of the three kingdoms will him to be their minister. By his side the rest of the cabinet is nothing; he is the government itself.

There are few questions which better deserve the attention of the political student. Answers have been thrown out in abundance; yet it is felt that the depths of the problem have not been reached. Lord Palmerston, we are told, is so genial; then he is so vigorous, and both the country and the House of Commons admire a green and untiring old age. He has such marvellous tact, too; no man ever exhibited such readiness in parrying dangerous thrusts, and laughing himself out of a dilemma. He is never to be caught; member after member has tried it. The coils have been drawn round him; the case has been thought excellent; a reply could not be conceived; escape seemed impossible; nevertheless, at the very moment when a crowded House has come down to see the subtle prey taken at last, there comes a joke, a laugh, and he is gone. In vain the baffled member implores the attention of the House to his grievance; it is against the laws of sport-and where is sport more mighty than in the House of Commons ?-that after a fair shot has been offered and missed, the quarry should not escape with his life. Such pluck and such adroitness, spirits that are never

VOL. LXIX. NO. CCCCX.

touched by the weight of years, an elasticity of temper and intellect which can never be entrapped into a dead-lock, are qualities which render Lord Palmerston the natural favourite of the House. Nevertheless, they do not quite explain his greatness as a minister. Neither will the solution be found by trying to discover a policy, a principle, a series of measures, or a great political deed which has become associated with his name, and furnished an object on which a host of followers might concentrate their efforts. There is nothing of the sort. Lord Palmerston proposed the army estimates for the campaign of Waterloo under the pure Toryism of Lord Liverpool; and, since that period, his accommodating genius has made him welcome to almost every succeeding cabinet. Lord

Russell has lived on a great doctrine. Amidst many practical errors, he has been true to a body of large convictions, which, in the main, have imparted consistency and dignity to his career. Lord Russell faithfully reflects the theory of the constitution which he worships. On any broad constitutional question, no one doubts on what side the Whig statesman will be found, or what doctrines he will advocate. Sir Robert Peel passed from one system of political views to another; but the process was gradual, methodical, logical. The path by which his intellect travelled may be plainly discerned; and however much the successive changes of direction which the policy exhibited may have bewildered his followers, the historian finds no difficulty in

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tracing the intelligible and natural course of his expanding convictions. But who has ever attempted to expound Lord Palmerston on the principles of a natural or rational psychology? For what doctrine is his name a watchword? Under what school or title shall his supporters be grouped? The thing is impossible.

Lord Palmerston represents a sentiment only, and a collection of personal qualities; no statesman was ever less the founder of a political sect, or the constructor of a special policy. Yet, if this is so, how comes he to be so powerful ? how is it that all England has set him up for its guide?

The explanation must be sought, not so much in Lord Palmerston himself as in the nation. It is the political state of the country, far more than Lord Palmerston's own personal qualities, which renders him so powerful and so stable a minister. No doubt these qualities fit in with the feelings of the people; but it is the people that, in their actual condition, have rallied round him as their representative, rather than Lord Palmerston who has won the people's admiration by the exhibition of a distinct policy, or retains their support by its vigorous development. He is no solitary phenomenon, no single statesman, whom the nation gathers round as the emblem of a distinct creed, or as a leader to a definite end. He is not a Canning struggling for Catholic Emancipation, or a Grey cheering on Reform, or a Peel training a nation to Free Trade, or an Eldon proclaiming the perfection of the Constitution; he is something quite different in kind. He is a minister of transition, but of a transition of a peculiar sort. Canning, Grey, Peel, and Russell have, each in his own sense, been ministers of transition; their career has turned on the renunciation of a past and worn-out policy, and the inauguration of a new one. They consciously devised and carried through measures which were revolutions in politics, which swept away institutions under which the nation had lived, and constructed others destined to develop a different phase of social and poli

tical life. Lord Palmerston also indicates, to a certain extent, a social and political revolution; but then it does not consist in any specific measure to be pursued, in any particular institution to be created, in a special repeal of old laws, in public action for the enactment of a novel legislation. Lord Palmerston denotes a pause, an interval between two periods; the calm generated by the dying away of one strong wind before it is succeeded by another current from a different quarter. One long political space is coming, or rather is come, to an end; a new epoch, not of measures but of feeling, is gradually rising up. The coming time is not yet recognized in its true features. It exists already, it is felt in every part of the nation; but it is not yet consciously perceived as a new period. The transition is as yet known only by detached symptoms, which neither statesmen nor constituencies have collected together into the conception of a distinct political state; and this is the reason why the position of Lord Palmerston is still a matter for wonder, and still stands in need of a scientific political diagnosis.

That the nation is perplexed by its own political condition is evidenced by many signs. The confusion produced by the return of Conservative candidates for Leicester and other Liberal strongholds was absolutely amusing. The Liberal newspapers were at a loss how to explain such strange occurrences. Was it possible that England had gone back to Toryism? Were Liberal ideas forsworn? Could it be that the superiority of the Whig creed, in which Liberal politicians had so exulted, and by whose help they had so long looked contemptuously down on imbecile Tories, was now discovered to be a delusion? Was the nation going to unweave the web of thirty years of legislation, and to return back to rotten boroughs, and protection, and privilege, and oligarchical rule? What sane man could entertain such a notion? Yet how were these startling facts to be explained? The spectacle exhibited by Parliament furnished no clue for

unravelling the mystery. The Liberal party, it was true, was in power. A minister of unrivalled popularity was at the head of the Government; yet that minister was probably in a minority, even supposing the whole Liberal party to be united; and undoubtedly the Liberal party was not united in his support. He ruled by the forbearance, nay, more truly, by the active support, of men who sat on the opposite benches. A Liberal prime minister governing by Conservative votes-what could be the meaning of such a contradiction? Mr. Cobden, at the end of the session of 1862, denounced this logic of facts as irrational and unnatural; he served notice of dismissal on Lord Palmerston; and Manchester votes were to compel all the members of the House of Commons to sit in their proper places. But the threat was speedily dispersed to the winds; one slight flutter in official breasts before the meeting of Parliament, and then the inexplicable inconsistency reappeared as strong as ever. The more seats were won by Conservatives, the more secure was Lord Palmerston's hold of power. The problem is given up in despair. The conclusion that the nation is determined to keep Lord Palmerston as long as he lasts about sums up all the explanation which political philosophy has been able to achieve.

Yet the key of the riddle lies close at hand; one needs not to go far to find a path through this labyrinth. We have said that the country is going through a transition; and that Lord Palmerston is the guide who conducts it across the interval. What, then, is the state of feeling which is dying away? and what is the new phase which is coming into existence? A few words will express the fact. The nation has become Conservative-heartily, thoroughly, truly Conservative. But

here everything turns on the sense of the word Conservative. Erroneous associations with this term lie at the root of all the perplexity which is felt in obtaining a clear conception of the situation. Conservatism, in the sense of wishing to recall old ideas and a past order of things, in

the sense of desiring to revive Test and Corporation Acts and Corn Laws, of resisting every form of change, of pronouncing English laws and institutions perfect, of standing still with folded arms, of disliking the advance in comfort and political importance of the lower classes, of wishing to weigh heavily on Dissent, and to degrade the Catholics into an inferior brotherhood,—in all these senses England most assuredly is not Conservative. No expression could more completely fail to depict the real sentiments of the Englishmen of our day. There is no going back, no regrets of the past, no repentance for 1832 and all the consequences which that great revolution has brought in its train; nothing of the kind. The boast of Diomed is now the boast of modern Englishmen, not in arrogance but in thankfulness; they know themselves to be better than their fathers. They have reached a broader civilization, a purer and more generous humanity, a more cultivated intelligence, a softer spirit, a richer, more sustained, and more ennobling prosperity. If there is a going back, it is to Pitt and the large ideas of that essentially Liberal minister. Liverpool and Eldon have disappeared; they are political impossibilities in 1864.

The great event which we are now encountering is the last wave of the reforming flood, which has swept over England for some thirty years. It is spent; and the ebb has set in unmistakeably. The waters had been dammed up by the folly of an effete Toryism; they broke the barriers in 1832, and it has taken all the years since to reduce the flood into the steady and calm stream of prosperous progress. We are witnessing the last stage of the period of reform. Not that reform has been harmful, or excites regret; the very reverse. The period of reform is closing, precisely because reform has done its work so thoroughly. The building has been put into complete repair, and men now are eager to be rid of the brick and mortar, and to live in the fair mansion, and to enjoy it. The most