There is one good result which often follows such a
change of Government as we have recently had,—namely, that men like Lord Danraven and Lord Brabourne, who have for many years affected a sort of half-and-half Liberalism, go over bodily to the Tory Party, to which they properly belong. At Rainham yesterday week Lord Brabourne made a feeble sort of apology for taking a peerage from the Liberals in order to vote steadily against them. He did not, he said, take the peerage as a bribe to vote for the Liberals. Of course he did not. But it looks very much as if he had taken it in order to make his position more comfortable in throwing the very little influence he has into the Conservative scale. At all events, that was the use he made of his peerage; and now he says, by way of excuse, that the Conservative Party is the only party in which it is possible to be a moderate man at all. Well, it is clear enough, then, that Lord Brabourne does not understand moderation to mean the same as lukewarmness, for he was lukewarm as a Liberal, and, if he chose, no doubt he might be lukewarm as a Conservative. Probably he means by "moderate," as so many do, moderately opposed to the cause of the people ; and if that be his meaning, he is quite right in joining the Conserva- tives. The only question is whether he is at present even moderate in that sense. Certainly he is in a fair way to become immoderately opposed to the popular cause.
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