tation of their
priests.

Inconsistency is no necessary condemnation of a politician, and parties
as well as individual statesmen have abundantly shown it. It would lead
me too far in a book in which the moral difficulties of politics form
only one subdivision, to enter into the history of English parties; but
those who will do so will easily convince themselves that there is
hardly a principle of political action that has not in party history
been abandoned, and that not unfrequently parties have come to advocate
at one period of their history the very measures which at another period
they most strenuously resisted. Changed circumstances, the growth or
decline of intellectual tendencies, party strategy, individual
influence, have all contributed to these mutations, and most of them
have been due to very blended motives of patriotism and self-interest.

In judging the moral quality of the changes of party leaders, the
element of time will usually be of capital importance. Violent and
sudden reversals of policy are never effected by a party without a great
loss of moral weight; though there are circumstances under which they
have been imperatively required. No one will now dispute the integrity
of the motives that induced the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel
to carry Catholic Emancipation in 1829, when the Clare election had
brought Ireland to the verge of revolution; and the conduct of Sir
Robert Peel in carrying the repeal of the Corn Laws was certainly not
due to any motive either of personal or party ambition, though it may be
urged with force that at a time when he was still the leader of the
Protectionist party his mind had been manifestly moving in the direction
of Free trade, and that the Irish famine, though not a mere pretext, was
not wholly the cause of the surrender. In each of these cases a ministry
pledged to resist a particular measure introduced and carried it, and
did so without any appeal to the electors. The justification was that
the measure in their eyes had become absolutely necessary to the public
welfare, and that the condition of politics made it impossible for them
either to carry it by a dissolution or to resign the task into other
hands. Had Sir Robert Peel either resigned office or dissolved
Parliament after the Clare election in 1828, it is highly probable that
the measure of Catholic Emancipation could not have been carried, and
its postponement, in his belief, would have thrown Irel