land down to that sanctioned by the Act of Union, and by slightly diminishing the superabundant representation of Wales, with the abandonment of the proposed addition, to that of England, the claims of Scotland can be fully and legitimately met without adding to the present numbers. In the interest of Scotland, we deprecate in the strongest manner Mr Baxter's unfortunate and unjust attempt to satisfy Scotland at the expense of England; and we earnestly hope that the Scotch members as a body will repudiate his unauthorised intervention, which is eminently calculated to defeat the very object they have at heart by the odium it cannot fail to bring on all who support it.
With these two exceptions, then, we are prepared to accept and approve the main lines and provisions of the Redistribution Bill as being the wisest, safest, and most legitimate solution of the great problems raised by the equalisation of the county and borough franchise. The vital question, "How will they work?" remains to be answered – and answered as it only can be, by time and experience. Pragmatical doctrinaires like Mr Trevelyan, and urban Radical politicians like Sir Charles Dilke, may vaticinate to their hearts' content as to the inevitable results of the great political revolution, to the accomplishment of which, we readily admit, they have largely contributed. It needed not, however, the 10th Satire of Juvenal to demonstrate the vanity of human wishes; and timid Tories may reassure themselves, in reading the tremendous prophecies of those exulting Ministers, by the reflection that they are, after all, nothing more than the ebullient expression of their individual hopes and wishes. We shall not, on the other hand, presume to specify any beneficial legislative results as likely to ensue from the adoption of the new representative system, but shall content ourselves with indicating the general effect and influence which it may be expected to have on the policy and destinies of the empire.
We entirely differ from those who anticipate from the rule of the democracy in this country either a selfish insular or a doctrinaire cosmopolitan policy. We see nothing in the past history or present tendencies of the British people to justify either anticipation. From the days of the Plantagenets to our own, the people, with Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman blood coursing in their veins, have ever shown themselves willing and eager to transgress their island bounds, and follow their natural leaders on any quest, religious, warlike, commercial, or purely adventurous, to any part of the known or imagined globe. There is no pretence for saying that the sturdy soldiery who followed Richard Cœur de Lion to the Holy Land, or his successors to France – that the adventurers who accompanied Frobisher, Drake, and Raleigh on their romantic if questionable expeditions – that the soldiers of Marlborough and Granby, of Wellington and Raglan, or the sailors of Anson and Howe, of Rodney and Nelson, pressed as many of them were under circumstances of atrocious cruelty and injustice, – according to present views, disliked or condemned the work they were called upon to perform on any religious, political, or economical grounds. Nay, in the very struggle for American independence the great mass of the people of this country were as resolute
