have regarded his own new fad Conceive Lord Somers or Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chatham or Mr Fox, Lord Grey or Lord Russell, gravely proposing that when a Bill has been twice passed by the House of Commons, it should "pass on, and receive the Royal assent,"-the Royal veto having been already abolished by Brightian decree! The probable explanation of the astounding discrepancy between these contemporaneous utterances of this tribune, who is not a Radical, is, that to him "the Constitution" means the House of Commons, which branch of the Legislature alone is, in his view, worthy of respect and consideration. Did our space permit, we should like to examine a little closely the tendencies and probable results of the arch-demagogue's nostrum for reconciling the two Houses of Parliament; but we must content ourselves with offering him an alternative still more calculated to develop the latest phase of popular opinion. Let it be enacted that when the House of Lords has twice rejected a measure sent up to it from the Commons, Parliament should be forthwith dissolved, and the electorate be called upon to give a final judgment. Fad for fad, our forefathers" would probably have preferred ours to Mr Bright's. But we have devoted more attention than they deserved to the foolish utterances of this aged agitator.

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While Mr Bright was presiding over the extreme left of the Radical party (to which he does not belong), Sir Stafford Northcote having just completed his triumphal progress in Ulster, was preparing to invade the Radical preserves of North Wales. Those two visits of Sir Stafford constitute the most important domestic event of the recess, and will ere long bear good fruit. Both required, in no ordinary degree, courage, tact, and self

camps

restraint; and those rare qualities were conspicuously exhibited by Sir Stafford alike in the Black North and in the Principality. In the former, to a population smarting under a sense of injury and insult, he addressed no counsels of despair or vengeance, but, declining to exacerbate recent grievances, directed the attention and energies of his hearers to their present condition and immediate future; and, stirring up the gift that was in them, showed how, by union and firmness, they might still render their historic province the successful bulwark of the integrity of the empire. To that great principle alone he appealed, and with signal success. If any doubt remained after the Dublin county and Monaghan elections as to the practical division of Ireland into two, and two only, political the Constitutional and Repeal camps-Sir Stafford's visit has effectually removed it; and we confidently expect an accession, not a diminution, of strength at the next election in Ireland. The same sobriety and moderation characterised Sir Stafford's utterances in Wales; and there also are the prospects of future success most encouraging. We derive not less confidence from the halting, hesitating tone which pervaded the speeches and resolutions of the subsequent pro-Ministerial counterblast at Carnarvon. Two or three Ministers and all the Radical members for North Wales were present, and yet no definite opinion was arrived at on the vital question, so sharply and summarily settled at Leeds, as to the position next session of the Reform Bill. The chairman, Mr Rathbone, was all in favour of local government reform, the Judge-Advocate pressed the superior claims of county franchise, and the meeting passed a resolution bracketing them to

gether. Meanwhile another Minister, knocking, it is said, at the Cabinet door-the Financial Secretary to the Treasury-was disburthening himself of much perilous stuff in opposition alike to Mr Bright and the Leeds Conference, and the Carnarvon Liberals. Mr Courtney actually ridiculed the Leeds programme, pronounced it impracticable, and combated nearly all Mr Bright's conclusions. Indeed the variety of views on the subject of reform, and on the place it should occupy in the Radical programme, is so great, that, up to Lord Mayor's Day, every suggestion made on one Liberal platform was answered from another, and the only point on which they all agreed was the omission of Ireland from their conflicting schemes. Some simple-minded people, reading that Sir Henry James had paid a visit to Hawarden Castle on his way to Dumfries, entertained a hope that light from headquarters would be thrown by him on the reform darkness; but the Attorney-General confined his observations on the burning question of reform to a repetition of his utterances last year at Taunton in condemnation not only of fagot votes, but also of a property qualification, and to a mild repudiation of equal electoral divisions. Close upon his heels came Sir Charles Dilke at Glasgow; but though he spoke at inordinate length, and devoted many sentences to reform, his hearers must have failed to discover from his discursive remarks what position Scotland is to occupy in the coming electoral earthquake. They must have felt, as he pleaded for a large addition to metropolitan representation, that it was to the member for Chelsea rather than the Cabinet Minister they were listening; and the trite denunciation of small boroughs like Woodstock and Eye fell flat on the ears

of Scotchmen, who possess no similar electoral peculiarities to attack or defend. Indeed it is easy to read, between the lines of the Glasgow resolutions, the indifference really felt in Scotland on the subject of reform. Scotchmen who have mastered and agree with Mr Duncan M'Laren's combined statistics, think a certain number of additional seats should be granted to Scotland at the expense of Ireland, and Glasgow Radicals would like to be secured in their monopoly of the three, or whatever larger number of seats may hereafter be assigned to their city, by the abolition of the minority clause; but of genuine enthusiasm for household franchise in the counties, and consequent equal electoral divisions, there was none and the only speaker who enlarged on the former topic was, oddly enough, an Englishman, whose claim to be heard was that he is a candidate for an English county constituency! Of one thing our English readers may feel certain, the Scotch Liberal tenant-farmers are in no hurry to hand over the electoral power they now possess to their labourers for such, disguise it as they may, would be the undoubted result of the assimilation of the franchise, which is now being so glibly and lightly discussed by Liberal orators. In saying this, we assume that it is really intended to place the power of voting in the hands of every householder dwelling in a county; but, looking at the penal provisions of the Corrupt Practices Act, it is impossible not to entertain serious doubts whether it is really intended to allow the purely agricultural and pastoral voters to exercise their nominal right. A remarkable note of warning on this head appeared in the papers immediately after the late Manchester election, in which the practical disfranchisement of a

large number of working men under the operation of that Act in that great urban constituency was pointed out; but if it be so in the suburbs of Manchester and other great towns, how will it be in the scattered populations of many of the English, Scotch, and Welsh counties? The law forbids the carriage of voters to the poll, the polling-places are necessarily in more or less populous centres, votingpapers are not permitted, the peasant cannot afford to lose a day's pay in order to trudge many miles to record his vote, and the result will be the concentration of electoral power in the small towns and villages which are polling - places. The only method, short of pollingpapers, by which this disfranchisement can be prevented the sufficient multiplication of pollingplaces-would so largely increase the expense of elections as to exclude all but rich men from the costly honour of county representation. Possibly it may be attempted to throw this burden on the rates. No such attempt in the present condition of the ratepaying mind has a chance of success; and we commend this difficulty to the consideration of those Conservatives who are disposed to think favourably of adopting household franchise in the counties. But having thus broken ground on the question of reform, we will venture in a few sentences to express our general view upon it. What, then, is the ideal representation of a State? for upon its attainment is based the present demand for a subversion of the settlement of 1867. The reformers of to-day answer, "The equal vote of every householder," or "of every sane man unconvicted of crime," according to the school to which they belong. The reformers of

last century, headed by Lord Chatham, defined it to be "the representation not of person, but of property"; and enlarging on this text, the great Commoner declared "that the knights of the shire”then elected by the freeholders exclusively. "approach nearest to the Constitutional representation of the country, because they represent the soil." What may be termed the modern Constitutional view is a combination of both, and is found fairly exemplified and effective in the present system. In the boroughs person in the shape of householders, in the counties property in the shape of £12 ratepayers and 40s. freeholders, are roughly, and in the main satisfactorily, represented. Nor is this all: under those two great heads, intelligence, education, thrift, and other qualifications, which justly find favour with the more philosophical Radicals of the school of Bentham and John Stuart Mill, have at any rate a chance of asserting themselves— a chance greatly increased by the varied character of the existing constituencies. Thus, taking the present system as we find it, with all its roughness, inequalities, and anomalies, we are prepared to defend it as approaching nearer to an ideal representation of a civilised community than any system which has preceded, or is likely to supplant it. This view, indeed, must have been shared by Mr Bright and his colleagues only three short years ago, when they proclaimed the present outcome of the system, the actual House of Commons, to be the best and wisest ever elected. If, then, so much of agreement exists as to the theoretical and practical merits of the existing system, why is it to be subverted? On account, we are told, of its anomalies. In what

sense, we would ask, are its anomalies greater or more grievous than the civilisation of which it is the outcome and the exponent? Is it more anomalous that one man in a village should have a vote and his neighbour not have one, than that one man should have £1000 per week and his neighbour only 10s. The destruction of anomalies in an ancient civilisation means the destruction of all social and material as well as political diferences between man and man; and must we take Robespierre or the International as our guide and lawgiver in this matter of reform, instead of Mr Chamberlain and conferences at Leeds or Glasgow? But what are these anomalies, the burden of which is so grievous as to necessitate their immediate removal at all hazards and at all risks? As defined by the leaders of the movement, they are two: 1st, that men living in houses under £12 rated value just outside parliamentary boroughs have no vote, while those living inside the boundaries have one; and 2d, that the agricultural labourers, as a class, are deprived of the franchise. It is perhaps worth noting that both these anomalies existed under every electoral dispensation previous to 1867, and were not created by that Act: nay, more, not only did they exist previous to and under the Reform Act of 1832, but were proposed to be perpetuated by every Reform Bill brought forward by Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Mr Gladstone, or Mr Bright. In one scheme of reform, and in one alone, that of 1858, did they disappear, and with them disappeared the Government which proposed their abolition. We are not concerned to defend that luckless measure, which fell beneath the combined attacks of Tories like Mr Henley and Mr Walpole, and the united forces of Whigs and

Radicals; but it is material to point out that although the county qualification would have been by it reduced from £50 to £10, the representation of property would, down to that limit, have been maintained, and the number of county voters would not have been increased beyond the representative capacity of rearranged county divisions. But the experience gained on that occasion was not lost on Lord Derby, Mr Disraeli, and their colleagues; and when, nine years afterwards, they were called upon again to deal practically with the question of reform, they maintained in principle the distinction between the two suffrages; and nothing ever fell from Lord Beaconsfield in subsequent debates to show that he was dissatisfied with the arrangement then made, or in any way inclined to repeat in a more hazardous fashion the doubtful experiment he had on a limited scale proposed or sanctioned in 1858. On the contrary, his speech in 1874 is a repertory of facts, figures, and arguments against any further lowering of the county franchise-though he was far too wise, too just, and too appreciative of the sterling merits and worth of our peasantry to defend their exclusion from the franchise, as a class, by the odious imputation of ignorance and unfitness urged against them by Lord Randolph Churchill. Do you recommend then, we may be asked, that no attempt should be made, if not to remove, at least to mitigate, the anomalies you admit to exist? By no means. It was well pointed out last year by Sir Richard Cross in Lancashire, that by the creation of a few new boroughs, and the rearrangement of the boundaries of a few more, the most salient of those anomalies in the manufacturing districts could be satisfactorily dealt with. One of the alleged