record that he desired an absolute Liberal majority in the House of Commons in order that he might deal with the Irish question independently of the Irish vote. The Liberal party, in its unimpaired unity and efficiency, was to frame such a scheme as seemed to it just to Ireland. His majority not sufficing for this purpose, Mr. Gladstone reversed his procedure, and endeavoured, through the providential instrumentality of the Irish vote, to force upon the Liberal party a settlement in harmony with Mr. Parnell's ideas of what was just and expedient. Mr. Gladstone, whose resources whether of civilisation or anarchy are not easily exhausted, not being able to coerce the Irish vote by a Liberal majority, tried to coerce the Liberal majority by the Irish vote. Whatever explanation may be offered, Mr. Gladstone has, by his own showing, been untrue to his supreme political duty to the one obligation for the discharge of which he remained in political life. He has betrayed the confidence which the Liberal party reposed in him, to hand down in unimpaired efficiency to his successors that great historic and providential instrument of good of which the guardianship had been placed in his hands. He has acted as if he were the owner of the Liberal party and not its trustee, its master and not its agent; as if it were at his discretion to guard or to destroy it; to leave the instrument to rust unused or to break it by misuse, or to employ it for any purpose which personal ambition or the caprice of the moment might dictate. We will say frankly that in our view Mr. Gladstone's conception of his relations to the party betrays a profound moral obliquity. He,' Coleridge somewhere says, who begins by loving Christianity more 'than truth, will go on by loving his own sect more than Christianity, and will end by loving himself more than either.' So he who begins by loving his party more than his country, will go on by loving his faction more than his party, and end by loving self more than either. We cannot help thinking that the later years of Mr. Gladstone's life illustrate this moral decline.

6

The Liberal party, which was the great instrument of Providence, was destroyed because it refused to be the instrument of Mr. Gladstone's personal ambition. If not a great man of action, Mr. Gladstone is at least a man of great activity. The necessity of being conspicuously employed in some world-resounding exploit has grown upon him with advancing years, until at last it has absorbed his whole nature. He has been surrounded by men who have

humoured him into the idea that, as the court is where the king is, so the Liberal party is where Mr. Gladstone is; that he constitutes it, that he is it. Lord Wolverton, who has a singular faculty of making foolish speeches, denounces as traitors those politicians who, to use Mr. Bright's phrase, decline to turn their coats simply because Mr. Gladstone has turned his coat. This criticism, if that can be so called which is mere abuse, corresponds to a feeling which gives to the project of Home Rule an apparent popular sanction that does not belong to it. If a Liberal is to be defined as a follower of Mr. Gladstone, of course any one who declines to follow Mr. Gladstone ceases thereby to be a Liberal. If the Liberal creed is the creed which Mr. Gladstone for the moment professes, if any opinion which he adopts becomes immediately an article of faith, an old Liberal ceases to be a Liberal at all, just as an old Catholic, who refuses the Vatican decrees, ceases in the Pope's view to be a Catholic. It is this servile doctrine of the purely personal basis and obligations of party that keeps the Gladstonians together. The Dissentient Liberals, as Mr. Gladstone calls those who adhere to the old Liberal creed, have done a service only second to that which they have rendered in saving the Union, by revolting against and breaking down this abject superstition. A demagogic dictatorship is the great danger of English politics, and a return to principles, even though it should break up parties, may be essential when parties have become simply the retainers of great political chiefs. If anti-vaccinationists, female suffragists, local optionists, antiState-churchists, feel themselves at liberty to make test questions of the several principles--we will not call all of them fads-expressed in these names, and to vote for or against Liberal or Conservative, Radical or Whig, as they accept or refuse the required pledges, surely the maintenance or surrender of the Parliamentary union is an alternative which may far more legitimately decide party alliances and combinations. In it and in its far-reaching consequences the most vital issues are concerned. The idem velle, idem nolle de republica, which is the only legitimate basis of political connexion, could never be more legitimately invoked; for the question is whether the State shall continue to exist in the form to which a thousand years of history have brought it, and which it has for nearly a century exhibited, or whether a disjointed federation of mutually jealous and semi-hostile provinces shall be substituted for it. But this is not all. In the address, which a large number of

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the most eminent graduates of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, members of the Liberal party, counting in their number men of European eminence in every department of scholarship, science, and speculation, have presented to Lord Hartington, they rather imply than distinctly express their approval of his opposition to Mr. Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule. They single out for emphatic commendation his endeavours to save the name of English Liberalism 'from being perverted to describe a doctrine of lawlessness,' and from being soiled by connivance with that abuse of the forms of the House of Commons and that waste of its time which threaten to bring our Parliamentary insti'tutions into contempt.' The tone of many of Mr. Gladstone's recent speeches, and the whole spirit of his review, in the Nineteenth Century,' of the last two volumes of Mr. Lecky's masterly History of England in the Eighteenth Century,' show his tendency to the Jacobinical spirit of the French Revolution. This spirit has long been subtly working within the Liberal party, and Mr. Gladstone's declaration in favour of Home Rule has simply given occasion for its display. That was a concession to rebellion against the authority of Parliament and the law, and it has speedily developed into principles hostile to legal order and constitutional government. However lamentable the result may be with respect to the fame of the greatest Englishman of his generation, whom history, however, will judge not by the closing years of his career, which for the moment we can alone take into account, but by its whole course, we cannot regret that the matter should have been brought to a clearly defined and decisive issue. Mr. Gladstone has become the captive of the Home Rule party, and in subscribing to their end he has adopted their doctrines and methods.

The future will decide not merely whether Ireland shall be separated from England, but whether England shall be governed on Irish-American principles. It is absurd to say, as Mr. Gladstone does, that Ireland objects even to beneficent laws when they come to it clothed in a foreign guise—that is to say, when they are invested with the authority of that Imperial Parliament in which Ireland has more than a fair representation. Neither Ireland at large, nor Irish members, have ever shown the slightest indisposition to receive, or even extort from, the Imperial Parliament all that they can get, and to use it to the utmost. What they object to is the authority of Parliament and of law. They would exhibit the same hostility to the enactments of a legislative body in

Dublin, and to the enforcement of those enactments by the judicial and executive powers, if they were not to their mind, that they show to the Imperial Parliament and the Queen's authority. They have been taught the lesson of rebellion and disorder by Mr. Gladstone, or rather they have taught it him, and been confirmed in it by his conversion, and they will better the instruction when they are confronted by feebler powers of resistance. Disaffection on this side of the Channel has been encouraged by the preaching here of the doctrine of anarchy and revolt by which Ireland has been demoralised. The danger can be met only by the consolidation into one party of all the supporters of Parliamentary rule, and of the supremacy of law and social order. It is fortunate that England possesses in Lord Hartington a statesman whose position and personal qualities make him the natural head of such a party. Mr. Gladstone's withdrawal from the Liberal leadership in 1875 gave Lord Hartington for the first time the opportunity of showing the remarkable gifts of intellect and character by which he is distinguished. Mr. Gladstone's adoption of the Separatist projects of Mr. Parnell, and his capitulation to the anarchic and factious doctrines of the Irish revolutionary party, have enabled Lord Hartington to display yet more signally the highest qualities of statesmanship. The hour has brought the man. Mr. Gladstone's fault is half redeemed by the disclosure which it has made to the nation of the security which it possesses against danger in the strong and sagacious intelligence, the upright character, and the steady and disinterested purpose of Lord Hartington. He is the best type of the English politician, and the nation trusts him absolutely. He will be true to that trust, because he cannot be untrue to himself. Mr. Gladstone's latest device of a provisional and sham retention of Irish members at Westminster, while giving them a parliament in Dublin, which, practically independent from the first, would soon become formally so, is simply trifling with the subject and the nation. With the help of Sir George Trevelyan it seems temporarily to have imposed on some hundreds of the electors of Spalding. The words in which Lord Hartington concluded his speech at Blackburn express, however, we feel sure, the conviction and purpose of the nation :- No 'solution is admissible which does not subordinate whatever 'local autonomy it may grant to the maintenance of one Imperial Parliament, competent to deal as it pleases, and in what manner it pleases, in the way it thinks right and

'just and fairest, not only with any one portion, but with "every portion of the United Kingdom.' The parallel which Mr. Gladstone drew in his speech at Sir Joseph Pease's symposium on July 2 between the relations which Ireland would hold under his scheme to the Imperial Parliament and those of New South Wales, Victoria, and our greater colonies, betrays his inner, perhaps unconscious, thought. These colonies are not represented in the House of Commons. Parliament, whatever rights are formally reserved, would never venture to exercise any authority over them in the conduct of their own business, and feels no responsibility for it, and their union with England endures simply as long as they desire that it shall endure. This state of things, which is Mr. Gladstone's ideal for Ireland, is that against which Lord Hartington strenuously sets his face. Mr. Gladstone's criticisms of his former colleague, it is not necessary to say one word. We are content to leave to the judgement of the nation the qualities of mind and character revealed in the speeches at Manchester and Blackburn and at Devonshire House, and those betrayed in the speech at Sir Joseph Pease's and in the subsequent correspondence.

Note on the Article on the Education of Women.'

SINCE this article was printed, an event has occurred which confirms in so striking a manner our brightest hopes, and reflects so much honour on Girton College, that it deserves to be recorded in this place. Miss Ramsay, the young daughter of a Scotch baronet, has been placed at the head of the classical students of the University of Cambridge in the present year, and this lady has achieved the almost unprecedented feat of standing in the classical Tripos, alone-not only without a rival, but without a competitor. We heartily congratulate her on a success which does so much honour to Scotland, to Girton, and to herself. This incident affords the most substantial ground for the claim, supported as it is by very high authority, for the admission of women to the degrees conferred by the University.

No. CCCXL. will be published in October,