siveness of their warning; and the worthy but weak-headed writer utters denunciations of woe, as if he were a second Jeremiah. It must be rather a novelty to Sir Robert Peel to find himself thus held up as a pillar of the Church; certainly his eccentric effusions on the Irish Establishment can hardly warrant so great an honour. It is not, however, worth while to attempt any estimate of such an exceedingly unknown quality as Sir Robert Peel's opinionsunknown, we suspect, even to himself; but it is well worth while to note what manner of thing is the ecclesiastical policy of the Tory party. Mr. Goschen has declared himself in favour of the admission of Dissenters to the English Universities, therefore he is 'unsectarian,' or, as the Quarterly would prefer to call him, an infidel; and therefore his accession to office marks the beginning of a long series of attacks on the Established Church. A somewhat narrow basis this for so imposing a superstructure. If these things are so, it becomes alarming to reflect how many infidels there are in the country, and in what imminent peril the Church of England stands. Are all the men who supported Mr. Goschen's and Mr. Bouverie's Bills in last Parliament thus given over to evil devices? Nay, the charge comes nearer home. The admission of Dissenters to the English Universities was advocated, not long ago, in these pages; so that the North British Review must be visited with the like condemnation. It is impossible to have any feeling save that of sheer astonishment when we see the organ of a great party, on the eve of a keen and important struggle, putting forth, in a serious manifesto, such silly and abusive twaddle. Fortunately for the Church of England, she has supporters who are wiser in their generation.

On the topic of Reform, the Quarterly is hardly less explicit. Mr. Forster is the stormy petrel here, and foretells many a tempest. The Quarterly frankly declares for no change in the franchise at all; or, if change must come, let it be after the fashion of Lord Derby's Bill,-that elaborate plan for so dealing with the question as totally to exclude the working classes, and lay the counties, even more that they now are, at the feet of the landlords. How many soever have been the whispers of wavering in the Liberal camp, industriously circulated by those whose wish was father to the thought, we cannot believe that any member of that party, which in 1859 united together as one man to throw out this very Bill, will now stoop to adopt the principle of deceit and delusion on which it was based; and yet from any Reform Bill other than such as this was, the Quarterly anticipates the direst evils.

Foremost among these will be the social and political power which the excited Liberal will, by means of a Reform Bill, be

enabled to enjoy. His chief delight under the new régime, according to the amiable motives which the Quarterly is pleased to impute to him, will be to patronize his Whig patrons, to fling back to them the condescension with which they favour him now with a scorn which he must as yet dissemble; and if they behave themselves with humility, perhaps to recognise their dutifulness by bestowing upon some Whig duke of exceptional ability the honour of an Under-Secretaryship; and when these exalted pleasures have been duly revelled in, there will succeed the imposition of all the burdens of the country on the rich, the fixing of a rate of wages by law, the establishment of a system of atéliers nationaux,—all measures which, as we well know, have so long flourished under universal suffrage in America.

Whether an extension of the suffrage will bring about these multiform mischiefs we shall hereafter consider. We are in the meantime immediately concerned with the position of the Quarterly, which is, that while the above evils must ensue from any extension of the suffrage, there are no real demerits now existing in the body politic towards the removal of which a Reform Bill would be a useful and important step. This cannot be too strongly dwelt upon, for it betrays the true motive of the Tory party in their resistance to Reform. That motive is not a sincere dread of the convulsions they profess to anticipate, but a wish to preserve things exactly as they are,-to perpetuate class privileges and the power of the Church, as formerly they supported the Corn Laws, and opposed Catholic Emancipation. The feeling which stirs within them is still the same; their attitude is still an attitude of fear and of hostility towards the bulk of their fellow-countrymen. That land should be concentrated in the hands of a very few; that the highest wages possible to many men should be eight shillings a week; that pauperism should continue in its present dismal proportions; that landlords should press the Game Laws heavily on their tenants; that Ireland should be oppressed by an alien Church; that the Church of England should monopolize the great English educational institutions,-these are all matters which, in the judgment of the Quarterly, are just as they should be; and it is because a Reformed Parliament might chance to think differently, that all Reform must be resisted to the last. And this haughty and dogged spirit, so rampant in the great Tory organ, cannot be concealed by Tory orators. Witness the late folly of Colonel Fane at Portsmouth, of Lord Ingestre at Colchester, and Mr. Seymour Fitzgerald's vulgar, and from him unexpected, sneer against manufacturers who 'live on the labour of their workmen.'

Similar has been the policy of the party. Church-rates and the Irish Establishment they have defended, and will continue to defend, at all hazards. On educational questions they have opposed every measure of liberality, from Lord Russell's great inquiry into the state of the Universities in 1852, down to Mr. Dodson's Bill in the last Parliament. For the former of these measures the Government of that day never, we think, received sufficient credit. It was strenuously opposed by the whole Tory party. Most happily their opposition was vain, and the result has been, that the Universities are now in sympathy with the nation as they never have been before. Their rewards and emoluments, now freed from absurd restrictions, are gained by those who deserve them; and thus the old is giving place to the new' in every Oxford common-room. It is a shallow, but too frequent question, What good does the country derive from a Liberal Government? To this one change we would point in answer. How great it has been-how important have been its results on the Universities, especially on Oxford, all who know the Universities are well convinced; and the constitution of English society is such, that everything affecting these great bodies must extend and spread itself, until it penetrates throughout the whole community. Many years will pass before the country will have fully reaped the beneficial fruits of that great reform accomplished by the Liberals, unaided by popular clamour, against the whole force of the Tory party; who, as they resisted the great step at first, so are now opposed, even more bitterly, if that be possible, to its being fully carried out. Nothing excites Tory wrath so vehemently as the proposal to admit any save English Churchmen to the emoluments of these academical institutions on which the Church has contrived to lay hands. There will be many a stormy debate, many a denunciation of Mr. Goschen and Mr. Bouverie, and other 'infidels,' before this measure of justice is conceded. So, too, on all cognate questions, the Tories are antagonistic to the opinions of the nation, and hostile to the true interests of the Church herself. As to education generally, the pretensions of the English Church, upheld by the country party, have succeeded in keeping England lower than any country in Europe--infinitely lower than Scotland, in which country, we believe we may assert, without any colouring from patriotism, that recent investigations have revealed a state of education better than was expected, and given more encouraging prospects of a non-denominational system than could have been anticipated.1 The country has not for

1 It is impossible for us in writing on political subjects to forget the crisis through which Scotland is now passing on educational matters. This is not using too strong language. A searching investigation has been set

gotten, and will not readily forget, Mr. Disraeli's amazing exhibition at Oxford, in the character of an angel; or Lord Cranbourne's declaration, that none but a good Conservative can be a good Churchman.' Whether as an angel, or as the reverse, Mr. Disraeli is at least never silly; but he should really try to restrain the fatuity of his subordinates. It is not at the present time that the country can afford to be governed by a party whose leaders entertain, and want the sense to conceal, such sentiments as that of Lord Cranbourne.

Second only to educational and Church questions in importance, if indeed second even to them, are questions connected with land, which are sure to occupy a foremost place in the politics of the future. No careful observer can mark without anxiety the rapidity with which the land of England is being absorbed into the hands of a few. The most careless would, we suspect, be startled, could the contrast in this respect between the England of the present day and the England of a century ago, be fully brought before them. No one, we suppose, will dispute that this is a great evil. We have been accustomed to hear sentimental lamentations over it more than enough; and that from the very party who now uphold it; but, sentiment apart, there can be no doubt of the mischief. The poor cease to have a feeling of interest in the prosperity of the country; the tie of sympathy between them and their superiors is broken; they are deprived of that elevating and invigorating influence which property or the chance of it never fails to exercise. These evils are not the imaginations of the desponding; the hope that they may be removed is not the dream of enthusiasts. The sight of them, and of the results which flow from them, has made our best historians concur in fixing the time when the people of England enjoyed the greatest wellbeing in the past. Writers so opposite as Mr. Froude and Mr. Hallam, while they differ as to the particular period entitled to this glory, agree in denying it to the present. But to none of these things are the eyes of the Quarterly open. All matters connected with land-the laws which separate it from other property, the laws which impede the transfer, and which aid the concentration of itare, like all matters connected with education and the Church, precisely as they should be. Any change would be for the worse; in no Utopia could improvement be found. Nay, even

on foot, and intrusted to competent hands; and we believe the result will be such as to empower our Government to put the whole matter of Scotch Education on a satisfactory footing,-if only our Government prove equal to its opportunity!

the suggestion that landowners owe something to fortune, or hint that their position involves some duties, is denounced as revolutionary. Mr. Mill, for example, has the following passage:

"When the "sacredness of property" is talked of, it should always be remembered that this sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Public reasons exist for its being appropriated. But if those reasons lost their force, the thing would be unjust. It is no hardship to any one to be excluded from what others have produced. They were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have cxisted at all. But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer. To reconcile people to this, after they have once admitted into their minds the idea that any moral rights belong to them as human beings, it will always be necessary to convince them that the exclusive appropriation is good for mankind on the whole, themselves included. . . . Landed property is felt, even by those who are most tenacious of its rights, to be a different thing from other property; and where the bulk of the community have been disinherited of their share of it, and it has become the exclusive attribute of a small minority, men have generally tried to reconcile it, at least in theory, to their sense of justice, by endeavouring to attach duties to it, and erecting it into a sort of magistracy, either moral or legal.'-Polit. Econ. vol. i. pp. 272-3.

Some men may think that these sentences contain bold, and some may think they contain unsound, speculation; many will be of opinion that they bring out clearly the grounds on which the right to the possession of land is most philosophically rested; but very few will seriously believe that they necessarily lead to confiscation and revolution. And yet this last is the belief of the Quarterly reviewer. He shrinks from them with a sort of pious horror; denounces them as containing the germs of revolution, Jacobinism, Communism, and every other ism which can do duty as an exploding word in the place of sense or argument. He quotes the passage, and holds it up to mankind, with a ludicrous mixture of astonishment and dismay, as a specimen of the awful doctrines in which Liberals believe. Now, the article in question must have been written by a man who conceives himself competent to set forth the policy of a great political party. And yet he writes as if he had never before heard of such doctrines; as if the fact of any man entertaining them was to him a new and terrible revelation; as if, in short, his knowledge of Mr. Mill and his opinions had been acquired since the last election! The world has been often told by how little wisdom it is governed; but, after all warnings, one is startled to find simplicity such as this so near to power.

VOL. XLIV.-NO. LXXXVII.

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