We do not observe that the Financial Reform movement m
such way as might be expected from the machinery set to work. Some contrasts between the Anti-Corn-law agitation and the present are striking.
Both have had the general support of " Liberal" journals in the provinces such journals very generally 'representing par. ticular local cliques • but in the metropolis the case is'different 67 The League had as its special organ the leading daily paper which had long supported the Whig party : that journal, no longer Whig, is dead against the wholesale schemes of the new League. The party is understood to possess an "organ " in the daily press, but the vitality of that organ is at least undeveloped. The Lead- ing Journal par excellence, if it was not bound by an express al- liance with the old League, at least played to its hand, and made much of it : if not hostile to the new League, the same journal thwarts, slights, and ridicules it. The Whig daily journal is ex- officio opposed to the new movement. One shining light of the Free-trade school has gone into office, and now sheds its rays in a different direction.
In society one hears a good deal saicl in favour of the Man- chester movement, but not with any headlong adhesion to its avowed object. People applaud the notion of retrenching use- less expenditure and reducing taxes, but they have not made up their minds to all the complicated questions involved in Mr. Cob- den's proposal to recall the standard of 1835: this person is not quite sure that the Colonies ought to be sacrificed ; another is not clear that exactly ten millions can be struck off ; a third doubts whether it might not be unEnglish to cripple the Navy. Divers troublesome allies come out with rival schemes ; Mr. Macgregor, for instance, and Mr. Smee. Altogether, there is not unqualified confidence nor perfect unanimity. The question is not treated as a final and peremptory issue, but as an open one, which may be modified, and split, and pulled to pieces, and compromised, deferred, and defeated ; as one which may "lead to something else."
