speech; and endeavored to give effect to it by bringing in a bill to
lower the franchise, having, it seems, persuaded himself that a
five-pound franchise would create a more Conservative class of
voters.[273] He had scarcely introduced it when the fall of his ministry
led to its abandonment; but, though it was coldly received by the House
of Commons, the idea was taken up by the other political parties, who
can hardly be acquitted of having used the question merely as an
instrument of party warfare, trying, with an unstatesmanlike
indifference to the danger of re-awakening the old frenzy on the
subject, to rouse the nation to take an interest in it; but trying in
vain. The nation was no longer in the same temper as it had displayed
twenty years before. The Reform Bill of 1832 had been demanded and
carried with a frantic vehemence of enthusiasm such as could only have
been excited by real defects and grievances. But those grievances had
been removed and redressed. And the bulk of the people could take no
interest in schemes whose sole end seemed to be either to satisfy the
theories of some political doctrinaires or to embarrass an adversary;
till at last, as Reform Bill after Reform Bill was framed, brought in,
and defeated, or dropped, it became plain, "as the Prince Consort noted
in a private memorandum at the end of 1859, that what the country
wanted, in fact, was not reform, but a bill to stop the question of
Reform."[274] And, at last, the prevalence of this feeling Lord John
Russell could not conceal even from himself, but confessed to Lord
Palmerston, then Prime-minister, who had always silently discouraged the
movement, that "the apathy of the country was undeniable; nor was it a
transient humor. It seemed rather a confirmed habit of mind. Four Reform
Bills had been introduced of late years by four different governments,
and for not one of them had there been the least enthusiasm. The
conclusion to which he had come was, that the advisers of the crown of
all parties having offered to the country various measures of reform,
and the country having shown itself indifferent to them all, the best
course which could now be taken was to wait till the country should show
a manifest desire for an amendment of the representation."[275]

There was, however, in these years one subject in which the country did
take a real interest; that was the development and extension of the
principles of free-trade. On that the national vi