ldings, and that the approaches to the House of Commons were
besieged by an excited and tumultuous crowd. There was, in fact, such
a rush made to secure the seats in the galleries available for the
public, so much noisy struggling and quarrelling for seats, that the
Speaker was at last compelled to intervene and to declare that if quiet
was not at once restored it would be his duty to have the House cleared
of all strangers. Order was thus restored after a time, and at last
the moment arrived for Lord John Russell to introduce the Reform Bill.
That was indeed a moment of genuine historical interest.

The descriptions given at the time by listeners tell us that Russell
began his speech in tones which were unusually quiet, low, and reserved
even for him. It may be said at once that throughout his whole career
in Parliament Russell's manner had been peculiarly quiet and repressed,
and that his eloquence seldom had any fervor in it. That he was a man
of deep feeling and warm emotions is certain, but both in public and
private life there {138} was a coldness about him which often led
strangers into the quite erroneous belief that he kept apart from the
crowd because he was filled with a sense of his aristocratic position
and wished to hold himself aloof from contact with ordinary mortals.
As a Parliamentary debater he was singularly clear, concise, and
unaffected. He was a great master of phrases, and some odd
epigrammatic sentences of his still live in our common speech, and are
quoted almost every day by persons who have not the least idea as to
the source from which they come. His speech on the introduction of the
Reform Bill was even for him peculiarly calm, deliberate, and
restrained. It contained some passages which will always live in our
history, and will illustrate to the reader, more effectively than a
mass of statistics or political tracts might do, the nature and
proportions of the absurd anomalies which Russell was endeavoring to
abolish. It may be well to mention the fact that it was this speech
which, for the first time, introduced and adopted the word "Reformer"
as the title of the genuine Whig, and applied the term "Conservative,"
in no unfriendly sense, to the Tory party.

[Sidenote: 1831--Lord John Russell's speech]

Lord John Russell opened his speech by a vindication of the
representative principle as the first condition of the English
constitutional system. He made it clear that in the early