dealing with these hideous evils. We thought that these evils had only to be shown to the generous Briton and he would demand their removal; we thought that a Government, to whom such a demand. was made, would deal more strongly with this, which was the shame of us all, than the trustees of Mr. Peabody could deal, or the agents of Sir Sydney Waterlow. And there were other dreams, not the great visions of a purer world in which our souls delighted, but pleasant dreams which were so soon to be realities; and among these there was none so cool and pleasant as the vision of abundant water. Clean and abundant water was to be poured into our filthy London; the annual cleaning of the family filter would be no longer necessary; sound and wholesome water-butts in poor men's yards would be filled with pleasant refreshment, the true stream of life. And our wellloved river, too, in which we swam, on which we rowed, the silver Thames of Spenser-was it too much to hope that it might be made pure again and cease to meet the salt tide of the sea degraded and ashamed, a creeping sewer of all defilements?

Fifteen years have gone, and what have we gained? Something has been done to make it easier for a tenant for life to sell the family real estate; but the transfer of land still remains a mysterious business, involving solicitors' examinations, opinions of conveyancers, general legal expenses. Some progress has been made, I believe, in a new arrangement of statutes, but we hoped that by this time. the huge formless chaos of conflicting precedents, which is the boasted law of England, would have been shaped anew into an orderly and intelligible code. To-day, as fifteen years ago, behind our highly respectable street there is a piece of ground which belongs to a millionaire, and which is covered with rotting and poisonous houses, while in the picturesque village where we go sketching in the summer an open sewer runs gaily by the cottage door to bear its tribute of dishonour to our polluted Thames. As for the London water, the old system prevails; but, if we are discontented therewith, shall we not remember that it has done a much greater thing than get itself reformed? It has turned out a Government. What is the health and cleanliness of our city in comparison with a party victory?

After all, then, are we not forgetting the chief good which politicians have afforded us in these fifteen years? Each year of the fifteen we have been spectators, as it were, of an exciting contest. Each year the champions of the two great political parties have appeared at Westminster and engaged in a series of contests, thrilling as the combats in Ivanhoe' or the fight between Sayers and Heenan. Indeed, since the decay of prize-fighting there has been no show which has had such permanent power of attraction. Fights of Sayers, they may indeed be called by the unduly frivolous; and we are never tired of comparing these rhetorical champions, slily

noting their tactical dodges and applauding to the echo their stupendous exhibitions of staying power. The veteran, who has spoken for three hours without drawing breath, has moved our admiration as it was moved by the first pedestrian who walked a thousand miles in a thousand hours; and the rising young man of the political arena, who has neatly cleared an argumentative impediment, has gained as great applause as if he had jumped six feet high in the University sports. Each London season has brought some lighter novelties to please us for a day; but each recurring season has brought back to us the old parliamentary game, of which we are never tired. For the players it is as absorbing as cricket; and the accounts of its best nights are almost as interesting to the reader as the detailed reports of an Anglo-Australian match at Lord's. If I were not a Grace,' some lover of Dickens might say, 'I would be a Gladstone; if I were not a Spofforth, I would be a Churchill.' We love to watch the struggles of oratorical gladiators, to see the old parliamentary retiarius curl the net, and to mark the neat evasions of the light lordly secutor. Perhaps it is unreasonable of us not to be content though the result of the tremendous batties be but small. Perhaps we should acknowledge that the game is an end in itself, and that this is the chief good which we have a right to expect from the existence of the Liberal and Conservative parties.

Indeed such small matters as cleansing of slums or arranging of laws are not the subjects suitable for the big debates in which we all take interest. Egypt, Afghanistan, Ireland, these are the matter for abundant oratory. These furnish the war-cries, with which party warrior tilts against party warrior under the eyes of the imprisoned fair and the quick pencils of the reporting troubadours. Fragments of ancient Hansards hurtle in the air, recriminations, misrepresentations, howls and groans. What did the right honourable gentleman say in 1860? And if it comes to that, what did the member for Tooting himself say in 1870? With the permission of the House I will now quote the words which were spoken by the Prime Minister no later than Tuesday last. And I in reply will quote the ipsissima verba of the noble Lord at last week's majestic celebration on Primrose Hill. It was your fault. No; it was you who began it. So the combat roars in our ears; the gentle passage of arms lasts some fourteen nights or so; great are the deeds of heroes; and who are we that we should dare complain of muddled law and mouldy water-butt?

There is, then, much to be said from a sporting point of view for the existence of the grand old parties; and yet to some of us, who were full of zeal some fifteen years ago, it seems a pity that so little effect has come from these exciting contests, little effect on our lives and on those of our poorer friends and neighbours. Effects of a kind there have been indeed-the bullying and coaxing of the Afghan, the coaxing and the bullying of the Boer ; the bombardment of Alexandria,

the defeat of Egyptian reformers, the annual shooting-parties from Suakim, the death of Gordon, and the Stewarts, and Earle, the death of thousands of brave men of every complexion which the sun has seen. Negroes, Zulus, Afghans, Arabs, Dutch Boers, and English soldiers have been sacrificed to the demands of party wire-pullers or the reputation of right honourable gentlemen. "For Brutus is an So are they all right honourable men.'

honourable man.

Grim effects have followed debates in Parliament; bloody fights have parodied the glib combats of Westminster. But we are not content with such effects as these-nor even, so hard to please are we, with the state of Ireland, after all the cooling and heating experiments which have been made on that unhappy country. Our old zeal, our old hopefulness has gone; we have been driven to a cheerless cynicism. Nor do we hold it a sufficient explanation of our unhappy state that, as Mr. Herbert Gladstone has suggested, we have been cultivated to too high a pitch. On the contrary, it is as plain men, who looked for some plain result from the incessant speaking of politicians, that we are discontented. And who are you, it may be asked, and what does it matter if you are discontented? Well, I, who write, am moved to write because I believe myself to be one of many men who have taken from boyhood a keen interest in politics, and who to-day find it hard to take any part with any zeal in any political struggle.

Whither shall we go, and where is faith possible?

Shall we join the Conservative party? Shall we find among them the plain dealers and plain speakers, devisers of simple remedies for obvious evils? The Conservative party is not reactionary; it is not even stagnant. Its late leader extended the franchise; its present chief helped in the making of the last Redistribution Bill. Lord Salisbury has shown interest in the dwellings of the poor; Lord Beaconsfield suggested the cry of sanitary reform-'Sanitas, omnia sanitas,' said Lord Beaconsfield, feeling in himself for a moment the union of the Hebrew and the Greek: ὑγιαίνειν μὲν μέγιστον. The health of the people, if it were no more, were at least a thrilling party cry. How much might be done by a straightforward Conservative leader, with a single eye to the health of the people, and not afraid of the necessary interference with the rights of property, where these rights have been proved the causes of filth and of disease! But here is the reason why we do not find rest for our perturbed spirits in the bosom of the Conservative party. We hold it to be still a party of reformers in spite of themselves. And we hold it to be still to too great an extent a party of landlords. Its able and experienced leader is never so incisive and effective as when he is pointing out the difficulties of some much-needed change. He is a pessimist, and full of scorn. We seem to hear him say to his followers, 'Let us throw them this, which is as little as possible, lest more should be wrung from us.'.

And again, 'Reforms in England mean something to be got from the landlord.'

And yet is it not clear—would it not be clear to a young Disraeli of to-day-that a policy of simple and sensible reforms, founded on a study of history, growing naturally and adapting itself to the changing state of things, with no rude severance of historical continuity, should be the policy of the modern Conservative party? To love of this they should educate the new bucolic voter, and contrast it in his honest eyes with brand-new experiments, of which no man can predict the effect. The cautious Briton as a rule would rather see his ancient homestead adapted to his new wants than a new edifice run up by an architect full of fads; but, on the other hand, he prefers plain remedies for plain evils to enactments full of exceptions and sub-clauses and made mysterious by all the subtleties of all the lawyers. The Conservative party is full of ability and full of merit. Its foreign policy at least has been less spasmodic, less playful, less bloody than that of its rival; but we do not think that it will do our business for us so long as it can find anything else for our amusement. Big bow-wow debates, however they end, are not unsatisfactory to the most Conservative members of the Conservative party. Most of us have 'panem' of some sort; and the big bowwow debates are our Circenses.'

If it were well that Conservative leaders should look less grudgingly on moderate reforms, were it not well too that they should begin to guard themselves most carefully from looking at proposed changes with landlords' eyes alone? It has been said a thousand times that Conservatism is not confined to a class, but is to be found in all classes; and yet we feel that, when a practical matter is under consideration, the interest of the Conservative working-man, who pays a ruinous rent for an inadequate lodging, is of small weight in comparison with the fear of interference with the Conservative peer, who owns the court in which that lodging is situated. But landlords should have learned a lesson by this time. The doctrine that property in land differs from other property was discussed fifteen years ago (in the days of our enthusiasm) by economists in libraries to-day by Mr. George and others it has been brought into the market-place. Plain folk, who have a wholesome respect for property, begin to say to each other that land has always been treated, and always must be treated, as different from other kinds of property, and that they may advocate State-interference with landlords and yet not incur the charge, so fearful to the average Briton, of Socialism.

It is time for the Conservative party, as guardian of the interests of the landlords, to make the transfer of land easy and cheap, lest more be required of them. It is time for the landowner who cannot do justice to his land to sell, lest some fine day he be deprived of it

with inadequate compensation. Are not the sands running in the glass for him also? Is Ireland so very far away? Already our eternal Ucalegon is in flames, and the breeze sets this way across the

narrow sea.

The landlords of England have done great work for England in the past, and to-day too they are, most of them, honest and able and as generous as their means will allow them to be. But it is time that they, who ought to understand the matter best, become landreformers, lest men more ignorant and more violent than they take the task from their hands, and reform be lost in revolution. Let them free the land and encourage the growth of a free peasantry. There will still be room for parks and pleasure-grounds and covert for the pheasant and the fox.

If in these fifteen years the Conservative party has given us no great cause for hope, what shall we say of the Liberal party, in whom we trusted?

It gave us the ballot, but that is no matter for cheering. Secret voting at the best is no more than a necessary evil. It gave us board schools, and, in spite of the occasional overworking of the underfed, we are grateful for the spread of education. It is well that those who vote should be able to read, though we may well hope that their reading will not be confined to party speeches. Reading is only a means to an end; and small wisdom will the rustics gain by reading, as they now hear, the denunciations of the ins by the outs, and the denunciations of the outs by the ins. Of the experiments of the Liberal party in foreign parts no more need be said. And Ireland? It is with Ireland that the great Liberal party has been mainly occupied; and after years of judicious mixtures, after floods of rhetoric, now for coercion, now for conciliation, after three big measures, three messages of peace sent with appropriate perorations on the goodwill which was to follow, the great Liberal policy has come at last to this: We can't govern Ireland. Let us see if she can govern herself. If she make a mess of it, as is only too likely, we can walk in and smash her.

All that we can hope of the old Liberal party, in which we placed the innocent trust of youth, is that it is dead. It was a fraud. Economist before all, it has taxed us like a wringing-machine. Loud-voiced friend of the working-man, it has thrust down his hungry throat fragments of that old political economy which to suit a party need was sent packing with a shout and a scoff to the problematical population of Saturn. Dove-eyed prophet of peace, it has been fighting like a wild cat in every corner of the world. With mouth full of the finest morality and the purest motives, it has given high office because coal or iron was low, and has been not a whit behind the most cynical of Tories in appropriating secret service money to assist the election of its candidates. Nay, though