button, as is too common in controversial fencing even between friends, had once or twice come off the foil."

The emphatic allusions, which both these letters contain, to the prevailing bitterness, and injustice, of party feeling, may well sound strangely to us, who have already for two sessions been living in that atmosphere of good temper and good manners which pervades the House of Commons whenever the Conservatives are contented, and the Liberals despondent. It was a different matter in 1839. The closing years of the Whig Administration were one long political crisis, with all the disagreeable and discreditable accompaniments from which no political crisis is free. Public animosity, and personal virulence, had risen to a higher, or, at any rate, to a more sustained temperature than had ever been reached since the period when, amidst threats of impeachment and accusations of treason, perfidy, and corruption, Sir Robert Walpole was tottering to his fall.

'Lord Melbourne's Cabinet had rendered immense services to the country, and the greatest of those services was the fact of its own existence. In November 1834, the King, of his own will and pleasure, had imposed a Tory Government on a House of Commons which contained a large Whig majority. The fierce onslaught upon that Government, so gallantly and skilfully led by Lord John Russell, while it presented, (as it could not fail to present,) a superficial appearance of factious self-seeking, was in truth a struggle fought to establish, once and for ever, the most vital of all constitutional principles. Not a vote nor a speech was thrown away, of all that were directed against Sir Robert Peel's first Ministry. It was worth any expenditure of time, and breath, and energy, to vindicate the right of the country to choose its rulers for itself, instead of accepting those who might be imposed upon it from above. The story of the session of 1835 reads strangely to us who have been born, and hope

to grow old, within the reign of the monarch who, by a long course of loyal acquiescence in the declared wishes of her people, has brought about what is nothing less than another Great Revolution, all the more beneficent because it has been gradual and silent. We cannot, without an effort of the imagination, understand the indignation and disquietude of the Whig leaders, when they saw William the Fourth recurring to those maxims of personal government which his father had effectually practised, and after which his brother had feebly and fitfully hankered. To get Peel out, was in their eyes the whole duty of public men; a duty which they strenuously and successfully accomplished. But, in pursuing their end with an audacity and determination which those who had not divined the real bearings of the situation mistook for want of scruple, they made hosts of new enemies, and embittered all their old ones. They aroused against themselves the furies of resentment, alarm, and distrust, which attended them relentlessly until they in their turn succumbed. The passions heated during the debates of 1835 were cooled only in the deluge which overwhelmed the Whigs at the general election of 1841.

The Peers gave them no chance from the first. Those who have joined in the idle jubilation over the impotence and helplessness of the House of Lords, with which, in our own day, triumphant partisans celebrated the downfall of the Irish Church and the abolition of Purchase in the Army, would do well to study the history of the decline and fall of Lord Melbourne's Administration. There they would learn how substantial, and how formidable, is the power of Conservative statesmen who, surveying the field. of action from the secure stronghold of an assembly devoted to their interests, can discern through all the dust and clamour of a popular movement the exact strength and attitude of the hostile forces. An Upper Chamber

which will accept from Ministers whom it detests no measure that has not behind it an irresistible mass of excited public opinion, has, sooner or later, the fate of those Ministers in its hands. For, on the one hand, the friction generated by the process of forcing a Bill through a reluctant House of Lords annoys, and scandalises, a nation which soon grows tired of having a revolution once a twelvemonth; and, on the other hand, the inability of a Cabinet to conduct through both Houses that continuous flow of legislation, which the ever-changing necessities of a country like ours demand, alienates those among its more ardent supporters who take little account of its difficulties, and see only that it is unable to turn its Bills into Acts.

Never was the game of obstruction played more ably, and to better purpose, than during the three sessions which preceded, and the three which followed, the accession of Queen Victoria. "Lord Cadogan," Macaulay writes, "talked to me well of the exceedingly difficult situation of the Ministers in the Lords. They have against them Brougham, the first speaker of the age; the Duke, with the highest character of any public man of the age; Lyndhurst, Aberdeen, Ellenborough, and others every one of whom is an overmatch for our best orator. And this superiority in debate is backed by a still greater superiority in number." These advantages in point of votes, and talents, were utilised to the utmost by consummate Parliamentary strategy. The struggle was fought out over the destination of a sum of money expected to accrue from the improved management of Church property in Ireland. The Whigs proposed to appropriate this money to the education of the people at large, without distinction of religious persuasion; while the Opposition insisted on leaving it at the disposal of the Church, to be used exclusively for Church purposes. It was an

admirable battle-ground for the Conservatives. The most exalted motives of piety and patriotism, the blindest prejudices of race and creed, were alike arrayed behind the impregnable defences which guarded the position so adroitly selected by the Tory leaders. In the fourth year of the contest the Ministers yielded, with a disastrous effect upon their own influence and reputation, from which they never recovered. But the victory had been dearly bought. In exchange for the reversion of a paltry hundred thousand pounds the Irish Establishment had bartered away what remained to it of the public confidence and esteem. The next sacrifice which it was called upon to make was of a very different magnitude; and it was fated to read by the light of a bitter experience the story of the Sibylline books,-that fable the invention of which is in itself sufficient to stamp the Romans as a constitutional people.

Macaulay's letters from Calcutta prove with what profound uneasiness he watched the course of public affairs at home. A looker-on, who shares the passions of the combatants, is seldom inclined to underrate the gravity of the situation, or the drastic nature of the remedies that are required. "I am quite certain," so he writes to Mr. Ellis, “that in a few years the House of Lords must go after Old Sarum and Gatton. What is now passing is mere skirmishing and manoeuvring between two general actions. It seems to be of little consequence to the final result how these small operations turn out. When the grand battle comes to be fought, I have no doubt about the event." At length his sense of coming evil grew so keen, that he took the step of addressing to Lord Lansdowne a carefully reasoned letter, a State paper in all but the form; urging the imminent perils that threatened a constitution in which a reformed House of Commons found itself face to face with an unreformed House of Lords;

and setting forth in detail a scheme for reconstructing the Upper Chamber on an elective basis. Macaulay's notions were not at all to his old friend's taste; and, after a single interchange of opinions, the subject never reappeared in their correspondence.

On the tactics pursued by Peel and Lyndhurst Macaulay expressed the sentiments of a Whig politician in the language of a student of history. "Your English politics," he writes from India during the first week of 1838, "are in a singular state. The elections appear to have left the two parties still almost exactly equal in Parliamentary strength. There seems to be a tendency in the public mind to moderation: but there seems also to be a most pernicious disposition to mix up religion with politics. For my own part I can conceive nothing more dangerous to the interests of religion than the new Conservative device of representing a reforming spirit as synonymous with an infidel spirit. For a short time the Tories may gain something by giving to civil abuses the sanctity of religion; but religion will very soon begin to contract the unpopularity which belongs to civil abuses. There will be, I am satisfied, a violent reaction; and ten years hence Christianity will be as unpopular a topic on the hustings as the duty of seeking the Lord would have been at the time of the Restoration. The world is governed by associations. That which is always appealed to as a defence. for every grievance will soon be considered as a grievance itself. No cry which deprives the people of valuable servants, and raises jobbers and oppressors to power, will long continue to be a popular cry."

There is something almost pathetic in this unbounded, and unshaken, faith in the virtues of a political party. The praise which in a confidential letter a man bestows upon his contemporaries is pretty sure to be sincere; and, when Macaulay described Lord Melbourne's Administration as a