a man who has once been in the thick of it feels forlorn
and shelved if he lose his seat, and even repines when the accident
of birth transfers him to the serener air of the Upper House. Try that
life, Chillingly."

"I might if I were an ultra-Radical, a Republican, a Communist, a
Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing, for then the strife
would at least be a very earnest one."

"But could not you be equally in earnest against those revolutionary
gentlemen?"

"Are you and your leaders in earnest against them? They don't appear to
me so."

Thetford was silent for a minute. "Well, if you doubt the principles of
my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and many of our party
would be glad to see the Conservatives stronger."

"I have no doubt they would. No sensible man likes to be carried off his
legs by the rush of the crowd behind him; and a crowd is less headlong
when it sees a strong force arrayed against it in front. But it seems
to me that, at present, Conservatism can but be what it now is,--a party
that may combine for resistance, and will not combine for inventive
construction. We are living in an age in which the process of
unsettlement is going blindly at work, as if impelled by a Nemesis as
blind as itself. New ideas come beating into surf and surge against
those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and
breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those
which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day,
and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow.
And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these
successive mockeries of experiment,--for they are experiments against
experience,--and saying to each other with a shrug of the shoulders,
'Bismillah! it must be so; the country will have it, even though it
sends the country to the dogs.' I don't feel sure that the country will
not go there the sooner, if you can only strengthen the Conservative
element enough to set it up in office, with the certainty of knocking
it down again. Alas! I am too dispassionate a looker-on to be fit for a
partisan: would I were not! Address yourself to my cousin Gordon."

"Ay, Chillingly Gordon is a coming man, and has all the earnestness you
find absent in party and in yourself."

"You call him earnest?"

"Thoroughly, in the pursuit of one object,--the advancement of
Chillingly Gordon. If he get into the House of Com