THE Right Honourable gentleman, the member for Mid-Lothian, is a wonderful man. He demon strated in that county three years ago that the gullibility of the British elector, or the powers of irresponsible oratory, or both, could make it possible for a popular orator to say anything, and to be rewarded with public confidence for saying it. He unconsciously was the medium for giving the strongest practical illustration in our time of the truth of a view expressed by that most observant of calm historians, the late Earl Stanhope, who, in his History of England,' wrote

"There seems some inherent proneness in mankind to great national delusions. The same men whom we find as individuals watchful and wary, as a body will often swallow openmouthed the most glaring absurdities and contradictions; and the press, which ought to be the detector of such delusions, will sometimes stoop to be their instrument."

How truly do these words read after the Mid-Lothian campaign of 1880; and how still more truly, especially the last of them, do they read when the present state of things is compared with the utterances of that campaign, and the comments of newspapers upon them! Calm observers in 1880 I could not do otherwise than look on with regret at the spectacle of a great statesman of ripe experience, who had occupied the highest offices under the Crown, and been her Majesty's chief adviser, hurry ing about the country, and shouting from carriage-windows and railway bridges things that it was impossible he could practically stand

by should he take office again. Thoughtful men were much alarmed to hear views expressed on foreign politics, which, if carried out to their legitimate result, must be most disastrous to the imperial interests of Great Britain, and as a corollary from this, hazardous to the prospects of civilised progress throughout the world. Decency was shocked by the affectation of irresponsibility on the part of one who, it was shrewdly suspected, was covering under the garb of a "humble member" outside the circle of responsible politicians, the designs of the power-seeking chief, prepared, should victory crown his efforts, to exchange the guerilla goatskin for the gorgeous robe of the royal Minister. So unprecedented a mode of currying public favour and trading on the repute of past statesmanship, while hedging for escape from consequences under the guise of a monarch retired from business," and entitled to plead the irresponsibility of a free lance, astonished the whole community by its audacity. But neither astonishment nor regret could hold back from admiration. at the amazing powers of the man. All or nearly all were compelled to believe that speeches so intensely earnest in style were truly spoken in earnest, and that things so often declared to be uttered in "God's name" really were the expressions of fixed conviction. The denunciations which poured forth in torrents of eloquence were believed to be the expressions of an honest, as they professed to be the emanations of a sanctified, consideration of the events of the day. Men could not but hold that the speaker

believed the works of the Beaconsfield Administration to be corrupt, and that its destruction would be the beginning of a regenerate political life. Those of no very fixed opinions were swept headlong in the torrent of denunciation. They believed Mr Gladstone to be carrying away the bulwarks of a system which he convinced them was radically bad. Like men who only discover in what a vortex of sin they have been living, when some fiery evangelist shakes their souls by his thundered denunciations and awful threatenings of eternal damnation, so people who had been reposing in comfortable faith that the country was not quite going to the dogs in 1878 and 1879, were in 1880 whirled into the appalling conviction that—except in Ireland, the state of which had not been so good for a generationthe whole best interests of Great Britain were being neglected at home and brought to the verge of ruin abroad. To such a pitch were the minds of listeners roused, that they asked for no policy from him who thus laid on with his axe at the policy of others, as he would hack at a tree in the policies of Hawarden. They followed him blindly, as a preacher denouncing the path trod by others as a way of destruction, regardless of the fact that they were receiving no practical teaching as to the path in which they were to go, should they turn aside. The excuse put forward by those who were taunted at the last general election with having no programme or policy, was that Mr Gladstone had shown the Conservative Administration to have been so disastrous, that the putting right of its mistakes would be quite sufficient employment for some time to Reversal of Conservative deeds, and abandonment of Conser

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vative modes, made up the programme that was flourished before the country by the Liberal party, and a short term of that policy was to make straight the path of Mr Gladstone for legislation on the long list of matters, which he had declared to be held back only by a foreign policy that occupied too much public time, and fought for purely selfish interests, and by an Irish policy which did not proceed upon the footing that the Gladstone Land Act of 1870 had made everything smooth in the sister isle.

Mr Gladstone has now been in power for four sessions, the inordinate length of that of 1882 being a fair set-off against the shortness of the session of 1883. The word "shortness" is used comparatively -for all the sessions of the present Parliament have run further into the autumn than was the case under former Liberal administrations. The Parliament elected to do Mr Gladstone's will has thus run practically two-thirds of that period of existence which he himself has laid down as being the fullest allowable by the spirit of the Constitution, - although, according to the letter, its course might be protracted a little longer. For did he not, in 1879 and 1880, repeatedly and vehemently preach upon the text that the proper duration of a Parliament was limited to six sessions? He then can scarcely complain if the prospect of the old age of the Parliament which his colleagues declare to be the best that has ever sat at Westminster, is forecast in the light of the period of its youth and manhood.

"We may our ends from our beginnings know."

Still more when the end is approaching may we guess of what

kind it will be, when we have the history of the bloom as well as of the budding. What is to be expected from the "strongest Government" of the century working with the best Parliament that has ever sat, may surely be to some extent forecast by what they have done in the vigour of youth and the maturity of middle life. If the life of the Parliament is already on the decline, will any reasonable man believe that there is continued life for the Ministry when the Parliament expires, if its two last years in any measure resemble its four first? If the country is to have two more years of what it has enjoyed since 1880, surely a very slight alteration of dates and names would make the Mid-Lothian speeches of that year a fit model for anti-ministerial jeremiads in 1885. There would be this difference, and this only, that while Mr Gladstone's harangues in 1880 were directed against a policy which was consistent and firm, the Government we have enjoyed since has presented to the world spectacle of shifting and uncertainty unparalleled in history. No intelligible principle can be traced in its proceedings. Professions have been thrown over, as easily as the aeronaut empties his bags of ballast. Grand schemes are propounded, and in a few days airily abandoned. What was denounced as immoral and wicked, is repeated with a coolness that almost takes the breath from criticism, and is defended with a casuistry worthy of the most skilled professor of an S.J. College. Government-by-fraudand-giving-way is elevated to the position of a fine art.

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In that amusing comedy "The Colonel," there is a scene in which an American, who has come back

to this country after an absence of several years, names, one after another, several places of amusement he knew of old, and proposes once more to revisit. To his astonishment he is told, as he names each in succession, that it has been shut up. It is not difficult to fancy what would be the astonishment of a "Colonel" of political proclivities, who had visited Great Britain in 1880, and found amusement in listening to Mr Gladstone's Mid-Lothian speeches, could he return now ignorant that "a great deal had happened since then," and believing that the harangues he listened to at that time were the expression of the country's wishes, and of the truth of Gladstonian policy, should these speeches bring about his return to power. The stranger might "guess" and "calculate" time after time, and find that he was quite as far behind the events of the period as the "Colonel" of the play. He would probably remark that he found the Liberals boasting and gay, with all the light-heartedness and enthusiasm of youth; and believing, in politeness, that their aspect of complacency was genuine and just, would doubtless assume that they must have accomplished much and noble work, that they had relegated foreign policy to the graceful retirement of the Athenian woman, had by stupendous statesmanship avoided foreign complication with dignity, abandoned honourably the "filched" and "foolish" territorial acquisitions of their predecessors, shunned all interference with Eastern questions, where only British interests were concerned, carefully abstained from doing anything abroad without the "concert" of the other Powers, effected some extraordinary triumphs of peace policy, and made gigantic strides in

home legislation, and that Ireland was confirmed in that improvement which had so markedly called forth Mr Gladstone's approval in 1880. How astonished would he be to learn that Great Britain had been engaged in two wars-one to maintain the "foolish" policy of the late Administration; and that, after much bloodshed, the cause for which it was entered on was abandoned, after shameful defeat! What would he say on learning that the Gladstone Administration owed a revival of popularity in the third year of its existence to a successful naval and military expedition, undertaken solely in consideration of "British interests," and that "filched Cyprus had been used as a base for operations and a sanatorium for the troops engaged? One can fancy his asking, in a bewildered way, Is this true that I hear, that you have pushed your war-ships into a foreign port, and because the people of the country, seeing these ships with their enormous guns, set to work to strengthen their own fortifications, you battered them all down with your heavy guns, while your allies the French refused to have anything to do with your proceeding? It would hardly diminish his astonishment to be told that all this was done, but that it was not "war" -oh dear, no! If he went on to ask whether a large force was landed by us in the same country, and had with much expenditure of human life and money destroyed the only army the country possessed, seized the chief of that army, with the decorations of his own suzerain upon his breast, and deported him as a prisoner for life to a British colony, --and on all this being admitted, were to ask if that were not war, would he not be astonished still more to be told that-well, yes, on

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the whole, to be candid, we think it must be called war; but then it is not exactly like other wars, for “if ever a war was conducted on peace principles it is this war"? If the bewildered "Colonel" were then to inquire whether but for "British interests" there could be any justification of this war on peace principles, probably the answer would be, "Oh yes, but "—and then another canting phrase or two, and a round lie about it all being a legacy from the previous Government. Suppose the Colonel, hopelessly bewildered about foreign policy and the facts which constitute war, were to change the subject to Ireland, and to say, Well, I calculate under your Liberal policy Ireland must have been going ahead and improving, since you got it over so nice and comfortable as you said when I last heard you speaking." Would it be credible to him that Mr Gladstone and his colleagues, who had made the country resound with their denunciations of Tory coercion, and their gibes and jeers at Lord Beaconsfield's earnestly expressed alarm and solemn warning as to the condition of Ireland, should have their names associated on the page of history with such events as make the record of Ireland for the last three years? What would he say of the horrid roll of midnight murders, ghastly mutilations, hideous conspiracies, organised assassinations, dynamite plots,-an Irish secretary and his colleague gashed to death in open day in Phoenix Park, and a year after men and women dancing round bonfires in celebration of the shooting to death of the informer whose evidence brought conviction on the murderers? What would he say of Ministers so blind, notwithstanding the warning of their predeces

sors, as not to be able to discern that such a state of things was brewing, and refusing to take measures to put it down, and yet having to come, not long after, and coming unblushingly, to Parliament with a demand for coercive powers more stringent than the generation had known, and to which those that their predecessors had urged them to renew, were as a handline to a chain cable? What would he think of a Ministry that first thrust a number of members of Parliament into prison, and detained them there for many months without a trial, on the ground, as stated by the law officers themselves, that they were steeped to the lips in treason; and then, without there being any sign, far less promise of amendment, on the part of these men, carried on negotiations with them with a view to obtaining their support by their votes in Parliament if they were released? It might puzzle him still further to learn that while the Minister in whose department the proceedings against these men were carried out was so ashamed of these negotiations that he severed his connection with the Ministry, his colleagues were not prepared to admit that the things that had happened could be called negotiations at all, and preferred that they should be nameless. And what between war that is not exactly war, or is war on peace principles, and negotiations that are not negotiations, but something for which even Mr Gladstone cannot find words, "Our American cousin" might well agree with Lord Dundreary that Ministerial doings in this country under the Administration of All the Virtues, is a thing that " no fellah can understand." It will be seen before this paper is closed whether the other

parts of the Ministerial proceedings are more intelligible to the ordinary mind, or whether those already referred to are not typical of the whole.

When a man has posed long and ostentatiously as a model of piety, and made others believe in him as an embodiment of all that is excellent, society does not readily turn from its impression regarding him, and for long will strive to believe that things which seem strange and inconsistent must be capable of explanation, and are not so bad as they look. Accordingly the conviction reaches them but slowly that they have been deceived in the man; and if he be bold and brazen enough, he may even make them doubt whether they see rightly when they feel moved to condemn his actions. But in such a case, the downfall, when it does come, is all the more complete and disastrous, when the point is reached at which profession can no longer cover the true condition of things. So it has been, and so it will be, with the Ministry that was the outcome of the electoral campaign of 1880, when Mr Gladstone drove the Flying Dutchman of opposition at a furious rate, while Lord Hartington acted through-conductor, telling the alarmed Whigs to keep their seats, as there was no danger. Radical fads were hid away, Whigs were dandled to sleep over their terrors. Mr Morley backed Bradlaugh with his badge of atheism, Lord Hartington gave a helping hand to Lord Ramsay with the Home Rule cockade on his hat. No man appeared in his true colours. All was a bid for party power, and let principles find their level as they may. A united Liberal party was the idol that had to be set up for men to bring their