chosen bear traces only too manifest of a disposition to pander to the interests and the errors of the lower portion of its supporters ;-in fine, that neither the financial nor the foreign policy of the House of Commons elected by far the most numerous constituency yet known is such as we can consider either creditable, wise, or safe; and that, neither in courtesy, dignity, nor decorum have its manners been worthy of the past or models for the future.

What Mr Gladstone condemns and dreads in the House of Commons he states candidly and with force, though as yet he entirely declines to ascribe them to the extension of the suffrage.' But

the evils of our Parliamentary system I regard as great and growing.. The longer I live the less do I see in the public institutions of any country even a tendency to approximate to an ideal standard.

Yet every year, and everywhere, do they become more democratic.

Turning to our own, amidst all our vaunted and all our real improvements, I see in some very important respects a sad tendency to decline. It seems to me that, as a whole, our level of public principle and public action was at its zenith in the twenty years or thereabouts which succeeded the Reform Act of 1832, and that it has since perceptibly gone down. I agree with Mr Lowe that we are in danger of engendering both a gerontocracy and a plutocracy. The two circumstances which strike me most forcibly and most painfully are, first, the rapid and constant advance of the money power; secondly, the reduction almost to zero of the chances of entrance into Parliament for men who have nothing to rely upon but their talents and their character-nothing, that is to say, but the two qualities which certainly stand before all others in the capacity of rendering service to the country.

The place of the young and highly trained whose absence he deplores, has, Mr Gladstone says,

been taken mainly by men who have been recommended to their constituents by the possession of money. . . The loss has been among those who had the very best capacity to serve the country. The gain has accrued to those whose main object is to serve themselves. I do not mean in a corrupt sense. It is to serve themselves by social advancement. The total exclusion of such men is probably not to be desired, but their swollen and swelling numbers are a national calamity. It is a calamity with a double edge.

The excluded, Mr Gladstone says, are driven mainly to the press, which affords them a very much less valuable education.

It gives them a laborious training in irresponsible, anonymous, pungent criticism, in lieu of the manly and noble discipline which a youth spent in Parliament imparts. In the light of day, under the eye and judgment of the best, at once stimulated and restrained, at once encouraged and abashed, our youth had everything to sustain a high sense of political warfare, to develope the better parts of a knightly nature, to rebuke the sordid and the base. Invert all these expressions, and we attain a tolerably accurate description of the kind of education which our modern arrangements have provided for the most ready, brilliant, and serviceable of the young men of England in lieu of a seat in Parliament. These are not pleasant things to say, but it is perhaps time they should be said.1

The discussion on this subject has led me to reperuse Mr Lowe's testimony to the lowered tone and character of the actual House, so strikingly corroborative of Mr Gladstone's, though dwelling upon different

"Two new

1 Nineteenth Century, November 1877, p. 555 et seq. articles, pretty closely associated together, have lately been added to the Tory creed, not by a general council, but by silent consent-faith in the long purse, and faith in what Mr Bright in one of his many happy phrases dubbed the residuum' (p. 557).

points, and ascribing the degeneracy to its more obvious causes.

No one but the most bigoted partisan will deny that after four Sessions the Government is just as strong in the House as it was when it began. This has been achieved by consulting the wishes of the House; that is, by a lavish expenditure of public money, by a studious deference to all powerful interests, by a dexterous use of committees and commissions to stave off troublesome subjects, by a copious use of permissive legislation, and by never carrying or even proposing a single measure or broaching a single idea which soars above the level of the dullest and most self-satisfied mediocrity. As was said the other day by a gentleman who did not appear to be aware that he was passing the most crushing sentence on the existing state of things, the duties of the House of Commons now resemble those of a municipal council or a board of guardians rather than those which the House used to discharge. Most true they do so, but why is it? Not because there are no problems in the higher regions of statesmanship unsolved and earnestly craving a solution. Four millions of persons in London are left without the powers of self-government which are granted to most towns with ten thousand inhabitants and to many with much less; the government of the counties is left to a number of intersecting boards—that is to say, is abandoned to a state of the most hideous confusion; the law in all its branches requires revision and codification; the state of the navy is to all thinking persons a subject of the deepest anxiety; and the whole question of the higher education requires a complete and searching revision. If it be asked, Why do not these things and many others, of which thes are only a specimen, occupy the attention of government? the answer, if given candidly, would doubtless be, that these things do not pay. They require a great deal of trouble and research, they inevitably give much offence to the influential persons immediately concerned, and there is no popularity to be got by them. Those who elect the House which virtually appoints the Government, care for none of these things, and so very naturally none of these things are cared for. Politics in the higher sense of the term, are almost banished from the House of Commons, and no one seems to regret their loss.1

1 Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1877.

Certainly, whether we attribute the fact to the Irish Home Rulers, to a government unable to control or guide its supporters, or to the perverted views and passionate temperament of the bulk of those supporters, is it too much to say that the least noble-minded and the worst-mannered House of Commons we have known has been the one chosen by the most popular and broad-based electorate that has ever crowded round the hustings or expressed its wisdom and judgment at the poll? Nor, I fancy, would Mr Gladstone at all deny the description, however he might question the explanation I suggest.

IX.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.1

THE biography of this remarkable woman has been received by the public with the eagerness and interest which her fame and her works were pretty sure to command, and has been so widely read that all who see this notice may be confidently assumed to be familiar with the book itself. We can, therefore, dispense with the task of following the narrative step by step, or in any material detail. At the same time the reviews of it which have appeared have, with scarcely an exception, been so discriminating and appreciative, and on the whole so kind and just, that little is left to correct and not a great deal to supply.

But, deeply interesting as the work is, it is impossible to deny that it has given more pain than pleasure to large numbers of those friends who knew her best and valued her most truly. Her own autobiography does her so much less than justice, and the needless, tasteless, and ill-conditioned memorials of the lady to whom she injudiciously entrusted the duties of editor, have managed to convey such an unsound and disfiguring impression of her friend, that

1 Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with Memorials. By Maria Weston Chapman. 3 vols.