a remarkable degree the school of
political thought which has triumphed in our own day, though he did not
live to witness its triumph. At the same time it cannot be denied that
the Reform Bill of 1867 in the form in which it was ultimately carried
was as far as possible from the wishes and policy of his party in the
beginning of the session, and as inconsistent as any policy could be
with their language and conduct in the session that preceded it.

A parliamentary government chosen on the party system is, as we have
seen, at once the trustee of the whole nation, bound as such to make the
welfare of the whole its supreme end, and also the special
representative of particular classes, the special guardian of their
interests, aims, wishes, and principles. The two points of view are not
the same, and grave difficulties, both ethical and political, have often
to be encountered in endeavouring to harmonise them. It is, of course,
not true that a party object is merely a matter of place or power, and
naturally a different thing from a patriotic object. The very meaning of
party is that public men consider certain principles of government,
certain lines of policy, the protection and development of particular
interests, of capital importance to the nation, and they are therefore
on purely public grounds fully justified in making it a main object to
place the government of the country in the hands of their party. The
importance, however, of maintaining a particular party in power varies
greatly. In many, probably in most, periods of English history a change
of government means no violent or far-reaching alteration in policy. It
means only that one set of tendencies in legislation will for a time be
somewhat relaxed, and another set somewhat intensified; that the
interests of one class will be somewhat more and those of another class
somewhat less attended to; that the rate of progress or change will be
slightly accelerated or retarded. Sometimes it means even less than
this. Opinions on the two front benches are so nearly assimilated that
a change of government principally means the removal for a time from
office of ministers who have made some isolated administrative blunders
or incurred some individual unpopularity quite apart from their party
politics. It means that ministers who are jaded and somewhat worn out by
several years' continuous work, and of whom the country had grown tired,
are replaced by men who can bring fresher