many years to come the Irish vote will not be worth buying by any English party at the price for which alone the Irish are either able or willing to sell their support. Other and lesser inducements may be found sufficient to attach the degenerate followers of the Uncrowned King' to the support of the Radicals; but for their own sake the latter will have to make it manifest that these inducements do not comprise any pledge of legislative independence for the sister kingdom. I do not say we shall never hear of Home Rule again, but I do say that for many a long year to come we shall hear no more of Home Rule as the outcome of a coalition between English Liberals and Hibernian Separatists. Posterity must take care of itself. It is enough for the present generation of Englishmen that they have now succeeded in consigning Home Rule to the category of measures which do not come within the domain of practical politics. For which crowning mercy we should all be duly thankful.

In this respect I think there has been a considerable advantage in the dual character of the Unionist majority. My own views as to the present and future relations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Unionists have before now been stated in these pages, and I see no cause as yet to doubt their soundness. At the same time, I admit freely that, under existing circumstances, the verdict in favour of the Unionists will have a greater effect on the public mind from the fact of its not being simply and solely an expression of the popular preference for Conservatives as opposed to Liberals. The public are not unjust, and the Liberal Unionists have reaped the reward of the sacrifices they have made to the cause of the Union in the popular appreciation of the fact that, by returning Unionist candidates, the constituencies were not only supporting the Conservative party, but were protesting in favour of the Union in defence. of which the Conservatives and the Liberals who dissented from Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule policy had united together. Thus the presence of the Liberal Unionists as an independent party gave a distinctive Unionist character to the recent general election, in which it might otherwise have been wanting.

The defeat of Home Rule is the chief immediate result of the appeal to the constituencies. But it is by no means the sole or perhaps, in its ulterior consequences, the most important result. To understand the true lesson of the elections it is necessary to realise that the popular verdict means much more than the condemnation of a dangerous and impracticable scheme for the disintegration of the United Kingdom. Nobody who has watched the political tendencies of the day can doubt that the most significant feature of our era, in as far as England is concerned, has been the gradual steady growth of the Conservative party. I think myself that the phrase of Conservative reaction, by which this movement is usually described, hardly expresses its true character. It is not so much

that the masses have become Conservative as that they have lost their faith in Liberalism. Nor is it difficult to explain how this should have come about. The British public, irrespective of party names and differences, are averse by instinct to extreme measures and revolutionary changes, they are indifferent to the carrying out of abstract principles to their logical results, they have an innate preference for compromises, they are always inclined to let well alone, and, though they wish abuses to be reformed, they prefer their reforms to be carried out bit by bit and step by step. If this view of English commonplace political sentiment is correct, it is intelligible why the attitude of the new Liberalism should of late years have alienated the sympathies of the ordinary public. When Mr. Gladstone returned to office in 1885, after the agitation excited by the Bulgarian atrocities, the series of great Liberal political reforms which were compatible with our existing constitution had practically been exhausted. The country was not in the mood for any important further advance in the direction of democracy, and wished, in as far as it formulated any distinct desire, to rest and be thankful. In an evil hour for his own repute and for the welfare of his party, Mr. Gladstone suddenly made up his mind to crown his public career by undoing the work of Pitt, under which Great Britain and Ireland had been converted into one United Kingdom. If the policy of Home Rule had been as wise and as statesmanlike as in our judgment it was insane and hurtful, the mode and moment of its adoption would have outraged English ideas and beliefs. The conversion was too violent and too rapid to suit our English notions. For a century the Liberal party had accepted the Union as the corner-stone of our constitutional fabric. Every leading English politician of the day had upheld the necessity of the Union. Every Government which our generation had known, whether Conservative or Liberal, had been agreed in the policy of maintaining that Union at all costs and all hazards. And then suddenly the nation were informed that, in the opinion of Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party, it was the duty of England to undo the Union and to confer upon Ireland absolute independence both legislative and administrative. This astounding change of front shook popular belief, not only in Mr. Gladstone's statesmanship, but in the patriotism and sincerity of the Liberal party; and the downfall of Liberalism would have been. infinitely more rapid and more pronounced if it had not been for the extraordinary personal influence of the veteran Premier. No English statesman of our times has ever had such a hold on the popular imagination. Whether that hold was either well deserved or well employed is not a question on which I need enter here. It is enough to say that long after the British public had lost its zeal for Liberalism it continued to support the Liberal cause, because that cause was identified with Mr. Gladstone's personality. When the

Liberal party, thanks to the Irish vote and to the defection of a number of English constituencies, returned to office in 1892, they came in, not as Liberals or Home Rulers, but simply and solely as followers of Mr. Gladstone. Their one duty was to say ditto to Mr. Gladstone, and that duty they, as a body, fulfilled with unswerving and almost servile fidelity. To establish a union of hearts by repealing the legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland was the end and object to which Mr. Gladstone had devoted the remainder of his protracted life. Yet, when his Home Rule Bill was contemptuously rejected by the House of Lords, even his courage shrank from the defeat which he knew awaited him if he appealed to the country in favour of Home Rule. His followers, from one cause or the other, were keen about remaining in office, and so, as an excuse for not dissolving Parliament, the notable discovery was made that the Liberal party had received a mandate from the country, not only to repeal the Union, but to carry out the so-called Newcastle programme, and that they were not entitled to quit office until they had fulfilled their mandate. Mr. Gladstone, acting, I imagine, against his better judgment, gave way to the representations of his party, and then, after a few weeks, retired from office, leaving to other and weaker hands the task which he had tried and failed to accomplish.

To enter on any discussion as to the causes of the decline and fall of the Liberal party under Lord Rosebery's administration would exceed the limits of my space. This much I may say here, that I do not believe Sir William Harcourt or any other of Mr. Gladstone's lieutenants could have done as much as Lord Rosebery succeeded in doing. After all, he kept a party without leaders, without a genuine majority, without a policy, without a programme, and without the confidence of the country, in office for some eighteen months. If a noble life' consists in prolonging an inglorious existence by resort to every sort of shift and artifice, then Lord Rosebery's obituary notice of his defunct Ministry may be regarded as correct. But to an ordinary intelligence the career of the late Government seems one of the least distinguished episodes in our political annals; and the sentiment of the public at large is one of genuine regret that a man of Lord Rosebery's ability should ever have allowed himself to be associated with an undertaking foredoomed to failure and discredit.

How they filled up the cup, and ploughed the sands, how they caught at the idea of a crusade against the House of Lords, which was first started by Mr. Gladstone in his wrath at the rejection of his Home Rule Bill, and was solemnly proclaimed by Lord Rosebery as the commencement of a revolution, how the agitation against our hereditary legislators died away absolutely stillborn, and how the Liberals then hit on the ingenious idea that by introducing a series of Bills which were never meant to pass, and which as a matter of absolute certainty would be rejected by the Lords, it might be

possible to raise a feeling of popular irritation which in its turn might be made use of as an electioneering cry, are not all these things not only written in the annals of Hansard, but fresh in the memories of the public? Never before now has the House of Commons been employed in passing measures by the aid of the closure which were not intended as serious efforts at legislation, but which were introduced with the view of conciliating sectional interests all over the country and thus possibly forming a heterogeneous majority out of Irish Home Rulers, Scotch and Welsh Liberationists, English Teetotallers, Metropolitan Progressives, and Trades Union Socialists. There was, I admit, a certain cleverness about the conception, but it was cleverness of a kind which in public as in private life is certain to overreach itself.

To bid all round for votes by dint of promises that never can be fulfilled and of expectations that never can be realised may be dishonest, but it may also prove successful for the time if the promises and expectations appeal to the interests or sentiments of the great mass of the electorate. The late Government seem, however, to have been blind to the elementary truth that, for one elector whose support they bade for by holding out the prospect that in the event of their obtaining a majority his individual hobby might be advanced, they alienated a dozen others by whom that hobby was viewed with absolute indifference, if not with positive aversion. The idea of making Ireland independent was undoubtedly acceptable to a very large body of the Irish electorate, but it presented no attraction, to say the very least, to the ordinary British voter. The disestablishment of the Church in Wales might, though that is by no means certain, have excited popular enthusiasm in the Principality, but it was extremely distasteful to the vast majority of Englishmen, who are attached to the Established Church, and who could not fail to perceive that the overthrow of the Church in Wales must be the first step towards its overthrow in England. The introduction of Local Option, unaccompanied as it was with any kind of compensation for the liquor trade, elicited the sympathy of the fanatics of temperance, but it outraged the immense majority of sensible men who have no objection to drinking in moderation, who resent interference with individual liberty, and who hold that no man pursuing an honest calling should be deprived of his means of livelihood because that calling does not command the approval of a section of the community. The policy of substituting municipal for private enterprise may command the support of Progressists and Collectivists, but it outrages the ideas or prejudices of that infinitely larger body of Englishmen who share the old Liberal dislike to all unnecessary intervention of the State in private affairs. Just as the action of the London County Council has done more than any other single cause to make London a stronghold of Conservatism, so the favour shown by latter-day Liberalism towards

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Socialist doctrines has contributed largely to the Conservative reaction throughout the United Kingdom. The attack on the House of Lords recommended itself doubtless to that small school of doctrinaire Radicals of whom Mr. John Morley is the chief exponent, but it offended the good sense of commonplace Englishmen, who could see no reason for abolishing a time-honoured institution, which had just shown itself in full accord with popular sentiment, for the sole reason that its constitution is not in accordance with the logical principles of pure democracy.

By dallying with every section of the community which places its own particular hobby above all other considerations, the Liberals secured a certain amount of sectional support, but lost the confidence of the community at large. The unwisdom of the transaction is shown by the result of the polls. Home Rulers, Liberationists, Local Option partisans, Progressives, and Collectivists have proved utterly powerless to check the tide of public sentiment which has pronounced against the policy embodied in the Newcastle programme. Fanatics and faddists of all sorts and descriptions have received a lesson by which they themselves are not able to profit, but which will not be lost upon the politicians of the future. The broad, plain common-sense of Englishmen has, not for the first time in our island history, vindicated its supremacy. If any special proof were needed of the truth of this assertion, it would be found in the electoral condition of the Metropolis. If there is any part of the country in which extremist views of all kinds are likely to obtain a hearing, it is in this vast, unwieldy congeries of cities over which only the other day the Progressives of the County Council imagined they had established their supremacy. Where is that supremacy now? It is not necessary to carry back one's recollections more than a score or so of years to recall the time when London was a sort of Radical preserve, when the terms Metropolitan Member and Radical were wellnigh synonymous. To-day out of sixty-two London constituencies fifty-one are represented by Conservatives, three by Liberal Unionists, and the pitiful balance of eight by Liberals. It is not in the West End, or in the suburbs of villadom, that the popular verdict against the new Liberalism has been most pronounced. In the East and in the South, where the artisan vote is absolutely master of the situation, the judgment of the polls has been no less decisive than in the West End and in the City. Everywhere in London the Radicals have lost ground, and amongst the Radicals the most unfortunate have been the men who, either as Labour candidates, Socialists, or Progressives, professed to be the special representatives of the working class. The inference is obvious. The gang of noisy sciolists who considered themselves entrusted with a mission to reform London in accordance with Progressive principles have received their quietus, and London -the heart and the brain of England-has shown that its ideas,