An admirable letter was published in Tuesday's Times from the
Duke of Argyll, on Mr. Gladstone's proposal to diminish the duration of Parliament from seven years to either five or four,—in other words, to diminish the maximum life of a Parliament from six years to either four or three. The Duke remarks that we have had three Parliaments within the last three years,—he should rather have said, the last four years,— in all of which Mr. Gladstone has been defeated,—the Parlia- ment elected in 1880, by which his Budget was defeated in 1885; the Parliament elected in 1885, which was dissolved in the summer of 1886; and the Parliament elected in 1886, and still sitting. The Duke is mistaken in saying that the two last of these were elected under Mr. Gladstone's own auspices. Only the last of them was so elected ; Mr. Gladstone had resigned power in 1885, and the Parliament of 1885 was elected under the Conservative regime. Still, it is none the less true that by all three Parliaments Mr. Gladstone's counsels have been rejected, and that this makes out a strong case for a much more patient submission to the judgment of the country than Mr. Gladstone seems at all inclined to yield. And it can hardly be denied that the time which our present Septennial Law allows us "for watching and judging the conduct of those who assume to lead us," is not at all too long. It seems to us that it takes a very impatient Radical to see no weight in the Duke of Argyll's vigorous plea.
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