elected
for defence will then be carefully limited to the dimensions of the
attack. The next best service will be to remove from them as occasion
offers all unsightly excrescences, to put an end to any anomaly which is
beginning to excite remark, and to amend any faults of mechanism which
are likely to produce a jar. Such a policy of discriminating reserve may
lengthen out their existence indefinitely. But to force them to the
front, to exalt them as the ripest product of political wisdom, to hold
them forth as necessary to the maintenance of the civil and religious
liberties of the people,--this can only be the work of designing
adversaries or of blundering friends. As a basis of party action it
would be like sand. It would be levelled by the mocking tides of popular
criticism.

The programme of the "Two Conservatives" begins with a grand item, the
conservation of the liberties of the people. But why "conserve?" Why not
extend and advance them? Why should the present stage in the historical
growth of our liberties be selected as the point at which conservation
becomes a duty? Would not the party which undertakes the task to-day be
better pleased if there were fewer of them to conserve? The Tories have
always been adepts at conservation, but the things they have been most
willing to conserve were not our liberties but the restrictions put upon
our liberties. Since the liberties now proposed to be conserved are
assumed to be threatened by the Liberals, they must be liberties of a
special sort, such as liberty to spread infection, liberty to dispense
with vaccination, liberty to send uninspected ships to sea, to keep
children away from school, or to send them out at any age to work in the
fields, the factory, or the streets. "Personal rights" have good radical
sponsors in the hon. members for Stockport and Leicester. Perhaps
Parliament as a whole is the best sponsor. The Neo-conservative
programme should tell us what is meant by the liberties of the people.
The absence of definition may perhaps cover an imposture.

The next object of Neo-conservative devotion is the maintenance of the
rights of property. Those rights are of no private interpretation, and
belong to sociology rather than to politics. Every man is interested in
them who has anything to lose, or who has a chance of acquiring
anything. Hence they cannot be claimed as an appanage of Toryism. They
are placed under the common championship of all parties. But the