re was when Jeffrey, Smith, Brougham, and
Horner devised their Review in a ninth storey in Edinburgh seventy-six
years ago. It is the cohesion of a political creed that is gone, and
the strength and fervour of a political school. The principles that
inspired that group of strong men have been worked out. After their
reforms had been achieved, the next great school was economic, and
though it produced one fine orator, its work was at no time literary.
The Manchester school with all their shortcomings had at least the
signal distinction of attaching their views on special political
questions to a general and presiding conception of the modern phase of
civilisation, as industrial and pacific. The next party of advance,
when it is formed, will certainly borrow from Cobden and Bright their
hatred of war and their hatred of imperialism. After the sagacity and
enlightenment of this school came the school of persiflage. A knot of
vigorous and brilliant men towards 1856 rallied round the late editor
of the _Saturday Review_,--and a strange chief he was for such
a group,--but their flag was that of the Red Rover. They gave
Philistinism many a shrewd blow, but perhaps at the same time helped
to some degree--with other far deeper and stronger forces--to produce
that sceptical and centrifugal state of mind, which now tends to
nullify organised liberalism and paralyse the spirit of improvement.
The Benthamites, led first by James Mill, and afterwards in a
secondary degree by John Mill, had pushed a number of political
improvements in the radical and democratic direction during the
time when the _Edinburgh_ so powerfully represented more orthodox
liberalism. They were the last important group of men who started
together from a set of common principles, accepted a common programme
of practical applications, and set to work in earnest and with due
order and distribution of parts to advocate the common cause.

At present [1878] there is no similar agreement either among the
younger men in parliament, or among a sufficiently numerous group of
writers outside of parliament. The Edinburgh Reviewers were most
of them students of the university of that city. The Westminster
Reviewers had all sat at the feet of Bentham. Each group had thus a
common doctrine and a positive doctrine. In practical politics it does
not much matter by what different roads men have travelled to a given
position. But in an organ intended to lead public opinion toward