Many people will tell us that this is because the multitude, by whose votes the elections are now decided, is ignorant and capricious and unstable, and gets tired of those who have been managing its affairs for some time, and likes a change to something new, and then gets tired of this also, and changes back again; and that so we may expect to go on changing from a Conservative government to a Liberal, and from a Liberal government to a Conservative, backwards and forwards for ever. But this is not so. Unremittingly, however slowly, the human spirit struggles towards the light; and the adoptions and rejections of its agents by the multitude are never wholly blind and capricious, but have a meaning. And the Liberals of the future are those who preserve themselves from distractions and keep their heads as clear and their tempers as calm as they can, in order that they may discern this meaning; and therefore the Liberals of the present, who are too heated and busy to discern it, cannot do without them altogether, greatly as they are inclined to disregard them, but they have an interest in their cogitations whether they will or no.

What, then, is the meaning of the veerings of public favour from one of the two great parties which administer our affairs to the other, and why is it likely that the gust of favour, by which the Liberals have recently benefited, will not be a steady and permanent wind, to bear them for ever prosperously along? Well, the reason of it is very simple, but the simple reason of a thing is often the very last that we will consent to look at. But as the end and aim of all dialectics is, as by the great master of dialectics we have been most truly told, to help us to an answer to the question, how to live; so, beyond all doubt whatever, have politics too to deal with this same question and with the discovery of an answer to it. The true and noble science of politics is even the very chief of the sciences, because it deals with this question for the benefit of man not as an isolated creature, but in that state without which,' as Burke says, 'man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable '-for the benefit of man in society. Now of man in society the capital need is that the whole body of society should come to live with a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to man's true aspirations and powers. This, the humanisation of man in society, is civilisation. The aim for all of us is to promote it; and to promote it is above all the aim for the true politician.

Of these general propositions we none of us, probably, deny or question the truth, although we do not much attend to them in our practice of politics, but are concerned with points of detail. Neither will any man, probably, be disposed to deny that, the aim for all of us, and for the politician more especially, being to make civilisation pervasive and general, the necessary means towards civilisation may be said to be, first and foremost, expansion; and then, the power of expansion being given, these other powers have to follow it and to find

their account in it-the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners. These are the means towards our end, which is civilisation; and the true politician, who wills the end, cannot but will the means also. And meanwhile, whether the politician wills them or not, there is an instinct in society pushing it to desire them and to tend to them, and making it dissatisfied when nothing is done for them, or impediment and harm are offered to them; and this instinct we call the instinct of self-preservation in humanity. So long as any of the means to civilisation are neglected, or have impediment and harm offered to them, men are always, whether consciously or no, in want of something which they have not; they can never be really at ease; at times they get angrily dissatisfied with themselves, their condition, and their government, and seek restlessly for a change.

Expansion we were bound to put first among the means towards civilisation, because it is the basis which man's whole effort to civilise himself requires and presupposes. The instinct for expansion manifests itself conspicuously in the love of liberty, and every one knows how signally this love is exhibited in England. The Liberals are pre-eminently the party appealing to the love of liberty, and therefore to the instinct for expansion. The Conservatives may say that they love liberty as much as the Liberals love it, and that for real liberty they do as much; but it is evident that they do not appeal so principally as the Liberals to the love of liberty, because their principal appeal is to the love of order, to the respect for what they call 'our traditional, existing social arrangements.' Order is a most excellent thing, and true liberty is impossible without it, but order is not in itself liberty, and an appeal to the love of order is not a direct appeal to the love of liberty, to the instinct for expansion. The great body of the community, therefore, in which the instinct for expansion works powerfully and spreads more and more, this great body feels that to its primary instinct, its instinct for expansion, the Liberals rather than the Conservatives make appeal. Consequently this great body tends, and must tend, to go with the Liberals. And this is what I meant by saying, even at the time when the late Government seemed strongest, that the country was profoundly Liberal. The instinct for expansion was still, I meant to say, the primary instinct in the great body of our community; and this instinct is in alliance with the Liberals, not the Conservatives.

To enlarge and secure our existence by the conveniences of life is the object of trade; and the development of trade, like that of liberty, is due to the working in men of the natural instinct of expansion. And the turn for trade our nation has shown as signally as the turn for liberty; and of its instinct for expansion in this line also, the Liberals, and not the Conservatives, have been the great favourers. The mass of the community, pushed by the instinct for expansion, sees in the Liberals the friends of trade as well as the friends of liberty.

And Liberal statesmen like the present Lord Derby (who well deserves, certainly, that among the Liberals, as he himself desires, we should count him), and Liberal orators like Mr. Bright, are in fact continually appealing, when they address the public, either to the love of liberty or to the love of trade, and praising Liberalism for having favoured and helped the one or the other, and blaming Conservatism for having discouraged and checked them. When they make these appeals, when they distribute this praise and this blame, they touch a chord in the public mind which vibrates strongly in answer. What the Liberals have done for liberty, what the Liberals have done for trade, and how under this beneficent impulsion the greatness of England has arisen, the greatness which comes, as the hearer is told, of the cities you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen,'—this, together with the virtues of Nonconformity and of Nonconformists, and the demerits of the Tories, may be said, as I have often remarked, to be the never-failing theme of Mr. Bright's speeches, and his treatment of the theme is a never-failing source of excitement and delight to his hearers. And how skilfully and effectively did Lord Derby the other day, in a speech in the north of England, treat after his own fashion the same kind of theme, pitying the wretched Continent of Europe, given over to emperors, grand dukes, archdukes, field-marshals, and tremendous personages of that sort,' and extolling Liberal England, free from such incubuses, and enabled by that freedom to get its manufacturing industries developed,' and to let our characteristic qualities for industrial supremacy have play.' Lord Derby here, like Mr. Bright, appeals to the instinct for expansion manifesting itself in our race by the love of liberty and the love of trade; and to such a call, so effectively made, a popular audience in this country always responds.

6

What a source of strength is this for the Liberals, and how surely and abundantly do they profit by it! Still, it is not all-sufficient. For we have working in us, as elements towards civilisation, besides the instinct for expansion, the instinct also, as was just now said, for conduct, the instinct for intellect and knowledge, the instinct for beauty, the instinct for a fit and pleasing form of social life and manners. And Lord Derby will allow, I am sure, when he thinks of St. Helens and of similar places, that even at his own gate, and amongst a population developing its manufacturing industries most fully, free from emperors and archdukes, congratulated by him on its freedom, and trade, and industrial supremacy, and responding joyfully to his congratulations, there is to be found, indeed, much satisfaction to the instinct in man for expansion, but little satisfaction to his instinct for beauty, to his instinct for a fit and pleasing form of social life and manners. I will not at this moment speak of conduct, or of intellect and knowledge, because I wish to carry Lord Derby unhesitatingly with me in what

I say. And certainly he will allow that the instinct of man for beauty, his instinct for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners, is not well satisfied at St. Helens. Cobbett, whom I have already quoted, used to call places of this kind Hell-holes. St. Helens is eminently what Cobbett meant by a Hell-hole, but it is only a type, however eminent, of a whole series of places so designated by him, such as Blackburn, Bolton, Wigan, and the like, places developing abundantly their manufacturing industries, but in which man's instinct for beauty, and his instinct for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners, in which these instincts, at any rate, to say nothing for the present of others, find little or no satisfaction. Such places certainly must be said to show, in the words of a very different personage from Cobbett, the words of the accomplished President of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton, 'no love of beauty, no sense of the outward dignity and comeliness of things calling on the part of the public for expression, and, as a corollary, no dignity, no comeliness, for the most part, in their outward aspect.'

And not only have the inhabitants of what Cobbett called a Hellhole, and what Lord Derby and Mr. Bright would call a centre of manufacturing industry, no satisfaction of man's instinct for beauty to make them happy, but even their manufacturing industries they develope in such a manner, that from the exercise of this their instinct for expansion they do not procure the result which they expected, but they find uneasiness and stoppage. For in general they develope their industries in this wise: they produce, not something which it is very difficult to make, and of which people can never have enough, and which they themselves can make far better than anybody else, but they produce what is not hard to make, and of which there may easily be produced more than is wanted, and which more and more people, in different quarters, fall to making, as time goes on, for themselves, and which they soon make quite as well as the others do. But at a given moment, when there isa demand, or a chance of demand, for their manufacture, the capitalists in the Hell-holes as Cobbett would say, the leaders of industrial enterprise as Lord Derby and Mr. Bright would call them, set themselves to produce as much as ever they can, without asking themselves how long the demand may last, so that it lasts long enough for them to make their own fortunes by it, or thinking, in any way beyond this, about what they are doing, or concerning themselves any further with the future. And clusters and fresh clusters of men and women they collect at places like St. Helens and Blackburn to manufacture for them, and call them into being there just as much as if they had begotten them. Then the demand ceases or slackens, because more has been produced than was wanted, or because people who used to come to us for the thing we produced take to producing it for themselves, and think that they can make it (and we have premised that it is a thing not difficult to make) quite as well as we can; or even, since some of our heroes of industrial enterprise have

been in too great haste to make their fortunes, and unscrupulous in their processes, better. And perhaps these capitalists have had time to make their fortunes; but meanwhile they have not made the fortunes of the clusters of men and women whom they have called into being to produce for them, and whom they have, as I said, as good as begotten; but these they leave to the chances of the future, and of the further development, as Lord Derby says, of great manufacturing industries. So arise periods of depression of trade, complaints of over-production, uneasiness and distress at our centres of manufacturing industry. People then begin, even although their instinct for expansion, so far as liberty is concerned, may have received every satisfaction, they begin to discover, like those unionist workmen whose words Mr. John Morley quotes, that free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the toiling class.'

But we need not go to visit what Cobbett called Hell-holes, or travel so far as St. Helens, close by Lord Derby's gate at Knowsley, or so far as Blackburn; we Londoners need not go away from the place where our own daily business lies, and from London itself, in order to see how insufficient for man is our way of gratifying his instinct for expansion, and this instinct alone, and what comes of trusting too much to what is thus done for us. We have only to take the tramway at King's Cross, and to let ourselves be carried through Camden Town up the slopes towards Highgate and Hampstead, where from the upward sloping ground, as we ascend, we have a good view all about us, and can survey much of human haunt and habitation. And at this season of the year, and in this humid and verdure-nursing English climate, we shall see plenty of flowering trees, and grass, and vegetation of all kinds to delight our eyes; but they will meet with nothing else to delight them. All that man has made there for his habitation and functions is singularly dull and mean, and does indeed, as we gradually mount the disfigured slopes and see it clearer and clearer, 'reveal the spectacle,' as Sir Frederick Leighton says, ' of the whole current of human life setting resolutely in a direction opposed to artistic production; no love of beauty, no sense of the outward dignity of things, and, as a corollary, no dignity, no comeliness, for the most part, in their outward aspect.' And here, in what we see from the tramway, we have a type not of life at a centre of manufacturing industry, but of the life of the English middle class. We have the life of a class which has been able to follow freely its instinct of expansion, so far as to preserve itself from emperors and archdukes and tremendous personages of that sort, and to enjoy abundance of political liberty and of trade. But man's instinct for beauty has been maltreated and starved, in this class, in the manner we see; and his instinct for intellect and knowledge has been maltreated and starved, for the schools of this class, where it should have called forth and trained this instinct, are the worst of the kind anywhere; and its provision for the instinct which desires fit and pleasing forms of social life and