he leader of the tory party should
have vindicated his natural position, and availed himself of the
gracious occasion: he missed it; and as the occasion was inevitable, the
whigs enjoyed its occurrence. And thus England witnessed for the first
time the portentous anomaly of the oligarchical or Venetian party, which
had in the old days destroyed the free monarchy of England, retaining
power merely by the favour of the Court.

But we forget, Sir Robert Peel is not the leader of the Tory party: the
party that resisted the ruinous mystification that metamorphosed direct
taxation by the Crown into indirect taxation by the Commons; that
denounced the system that mortgaged industry to protect property; the
party that ruled Ireland by a scheme which reconciled both churches, and
by a series of parliaments which counted among them lords and commons
of both religions; that has maintained at all times the territorial
constitution of England as the only basis and security for local
government, and which nevertheless once laid on the table of the House
of Commons a commercial tariff negociated at Utrecht, which is the most
rational that was ever devised by statesmen; a party that has prevented
the Church from being the salaried agent of the state, and has supported
through many struggles the parochial polity of the country which secures
to every labourer a home.

In a parliamentary sense, that great party has ceased to exist; but I
will believe it still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated
memory of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and
in noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks up to the
Most High; it can count its heroes and its martyrs; they have met in its
behalf plunder, proscription, and death. Nor when it finally yielded
to the iron progress of oligarchical supremacy, was its catastrophe
inglorious. Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with
fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St John; and breathed in the
intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham. Even now it
is not dead, but sleepeth; and in an age of political materialism,
of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to
wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle
cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb
over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back strength to the
Crown, liberty to the Subject, and to