1 THE DECEASED PARLIAMENT. T HE Parliament which expired on Thursday
had a double character impressed upon it at birth, which it retained through manhood and old age. Called together by Lord Derby to support a Tory Administration, its first act was to reseat the Liberals in power, and it has ever since remained a Tory Parliament, exercising its authority through Liberal men, and on the whole in the Liberal way. Alike in foreign polities and home affairs it has displayed over and over again most reactionary feelings, yet except upon the Game Laws it cannot be said to have passed a reactionary vote. It has looked as a Tory Parliament would to the status quo as an ideal, yet has drifted as a Liberal Parliament might in the direction of progress. The double tendency has been marked even in the great subject which Tories say proves the existence of reaction. It has adhered with unshaken pertinacity to the existing scheme of the franchise, and steadily voted down every proposition for its enlargement, from Earl Russel's extensive Bill with its 6/. limit in boroughs to Lord Palmer- ston's mild suggestion of a 20/. suffrage in the counties. Ap- parently it has on this point been simply Conservative, yet its only electoral votes those for transferring four forfeited seats, were directly Liberal, and those who watch its internal pro- gress believe that it has advanced during the six years far towards a conviction that the workmen ought to obtain their share of power. Indeed the candidates who have just quitted its corpse are almost unanimous in admitting that their minds have imbibed this one ray of light. In ecclesiastical affairs the tendency has been most especially marked. As a rule all bills for liberalizing the Church, either by relaxations in discipline or by alterations in formulas, or by the removal of tests have been rejected, yet the House of Com- mons passed three votes of the most decidedly Liberal kind. By one it resolved that Dissenters should be admitted to the full benefit of the national 'Univer- sities, by the second it released Roman Catholics from the obligation not to attack a Church which they consider heretical, and by the third it reduced the stringency of the sub- scriptions to be made by the clergy. Only one of these measures has become substantive ; the Houses have been too Tory for all, but though so little has been accomplished, the drift of the movement has still been towards the Liberal ends, lighter eubscriptions, less rigid formulas, fewer disabilities, greater freedom of theological opinion within the pale of the Church. Nonconformists have gained very little, and Catholics still less, but the right of the citizen to all the advantages of his citizenship irrespective of creed has been again and again affirmed for Nonconformists by the votes on Mr. Gosehen's Bill, and for Catholics by the acceptance of Sir George Grey's liberal compromise about Catholic degrees. So in more secular legislation, although Parliament has not made or per- mitted any distinct advance towards the enfranchisement of the people, though it has denounced democracy with a bitterness which sometimes included freedom under that word, though it has accepted idleness with pleasure because idleness involves absence of change, though it has professed love for Lord Palmerston because he is Tory, and distrust of Mr. Gladstone because he is Radical, though it has even once given way to its impulses, and actually passed a law turning the rural police into preservers of game for country gentlemen, all the greater measures it has ac- cepted have been decidedly Liberal. It has from beginning to end, with the exception of the delay as to the paper duty, which just suggested the nuance of its collective thought, supported Mr. Gladstone's finance, which has been steady in the direction of freedom, of fewer duties, lighter tariffs, lower taxation, whenever the state of affairs would admit. It passed his Bills establishing State banks for the poor, and pledging the national credit to guarantee small annuities, both of them measures something more than Radical in their scope, and it swept through in the face of strong opposition Mr. Villiers's two Toor-law Bills, one for changing the rate by expendi- ture into a rate by property, and the other for Union rating, both of which were intended expressly to enfranchise the labourer. Indeed, taking all legislation into account, moral, financial, and legal, we do not know whether this Parliament, with its lethargic action and Tory speech, has not drifted farther towards the great Radical end,—the elevation of the masses,—than any Parliament since that which repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. Tory feeling has been perhaps more distinctively shown in education than any other point, yet even on that the only measures actually adopted have tended to release the higher education from sectarian restrictions, and to make the lower education more searching and universal The double impulse of Parliament has, however, been more conclusively shown in its foreign policy than in its home legislation. It has displayed almost in the same breath the Tory longing for intervention and the thirst for peace which has distinguished the Liberal side. The Houses have re- sounded with invectives against the oppressors of the Poles,. yet when a proposal to aid them was rejected Parliament endorsed the rejection. The whole nation was furious at the treatment of Denmark by Germany, yet no vote authorizing intervention could have been risked even by the Liberal Government. Throughout the American war Parliament was as a body upon the side of the South, exulted in the defeats of the North, refused to believe that the Confederacy could be conquered, received with cheers every suggestion,. or allusion, or misdescription which could be employed to discredit the formidable republic. Upon this, the crucial point of its history, Parliament was at heart distinctively Tory, yet. it sanctioned no measure of intervention, ordered no hostile despatch, condoned acts like the seizure of the rams which were obviously intended to favour the cause it had not at heart, above all secretly, though not in public, supported Earl Russell in repeated refusals to join the Emperor of the Frenoh in an act of recognition. Once also in the Danish affair the- majority was really decided by the vote of Radicals deter- mined not to admit a Ministry which might go to war with America, so that Parliament, as a collective body, really acted upon the Federal side. Even in the single case is_ which the action of Parliament seems to have been entirely Liberal—the struggle for the independence of Italy—there was apparent the most singular under-current of strictly Tory feeling, numbers of members showing the old Tory dis- trust of France, subdued only by an instinctive sense that Italian unity must in the end involve the downfall of the temporal power. Orangeism and Liberalism were for once allied to secure an act of justice.
With taxation reduced, and tariffs lowered, the poor encouraged to thrift and the labourer released from the soil,. Italy supported and France bound to England with stronger commercial ties, religious tests further discredited and clerical subscriptions made less burdensome, it is hard to. pronounce that the deceased Parliament is on the whole not entitled to the complimentary phrases written on the grave- stones of all who have died with a good banker's balance- And yet most Liberals are, we suspect, conscious of a stroag, wish never to see such a Parliament again. The battle between its instinct and its reason was fought a little too closely, resulted a little too often in an attempt to compromise. between virtue and vice for Liberals to admire its career with hearty cordiality. One had always a sense, as the Sessions succeeded each other, that its life had been beneficial, and. always a feeling that Southey's best line, "Blindly the wicke4 work the righteous will of Heaven," would be its most appropriate epitaph. There was a heartiness in the way it did wrong—as in the Game Act—and a lukewarmness in the way it did good—as in the dethronement of Lord Westbury— which always suggested the respectable citizen who would so. like to break loose, but is afraid lest with his character his. prosperityshould also be endangered, who wants all manner of tonics from outside to keep his conscience sweet, and rather grateful for the strong pressure which forbids him to havewhat he sees all the while would be a ruinous way of his own. It was a respectable Parliament, but not an upright one, active' but not enterprising, kindly, but not philanthropic,. advancing always towards the Celestial City, but wanting in its- heart to remain in the Delectable Land, where one loses the roll. There was no particular reason for hating it, or denounc- ing it, or pelting it, or throwing it into Chancery, and still less for pretending to regard its memory with regret. One can honestly hope that it is in heaven, if only for joy that it is- not here.
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