as the King himself to maintain what they conceived to be their imperial rights, and to vindicate their claim to rule those boundless territories across the Atlantic. So, too, in the rise and creation of our Indian empire, had Olive and his compeers and successors not found in the temper and genius of their fellow-countrymen sympathy and co-operation, their capacity and courage would have accomplished no more enduring results than followed the brilliant achievements of Dupleix and Labourdonnais. The remarkable expansion of colonising enterprise which has characterised the last half-century is but a peaceful development of the same spirit; and recent events have shown how completely those politicians were deceived who imagined that they who remained at home no longer regarded those who had left their island home as members of the same empire, subjects of the same sovereign. No: the deeper we strike down to the roots of our national life, the more imperial shall we find the soil out of which they spring; and that imperial federation, which is now exercising the thoughts and stirring the imagination of a few far-seeing statesmen and political philosophers, will receive an unexpected impetus and support from below.
On the other hand, that doctrinaire cosmopolitanism which constitutes the foreign policy of Mr Gladstone and modern Radicalism, is equally alien to the genuine sentiment of the people. It was not to vindicate the abstract right of Servians or Bulgarians to govern themselves that any large body of the people followed Mr Gladstone's Russian banner in 1877; it was the stories, true or false, of the atrocities inflicted upon them, which gave that unscrupulous orator his power over popular opinion: and follies such as the restoration of Cetewayo to Zululand, the treatment of the freebooting Government of the Transvaal as a well-ordered responsible State, and the assumption that our costly and sanguinary campaigns in Egypt are to end in nothing better than the precarious re-establishment of Tewfik on the throne of that country, separated by an imaginary line from the Soudan, will find, we are convinced, no toleration among the classes from which our sailors and soldiers, upon whom fell the weight and burden of those abnormal enterprises, are taken. Still less do we believe that the hardy sons of toil will be satisfied with the extinction, one by one, of the industries on which they depend for support, or reconciled to it by the abstract theories of the Board of Trade and the Cobden Club. It is satisfactory to notice that the first labour candidate who has been invited to stand for a purely working man's constituency is Mr George Potter, who, whatever may be his political faults in other matters, has the courage and good sense to adopt, in matters affecting industry and the colonies, a patriotic and imperial policy; and there is good reason to hope that through the increased number of county divisions a larger body of English and Scotch country gentlemen will appear at St Stephen's in the new Parliament than in any which has assembled there since 1832.
While, however, we thus take a cheerful view of the general spirit which will characterise and direct the revolutionised House of Commons, we are by no means insensible to the risks and dangers which beset so democratic a body as it will necessarily become. Passion, impatience, incapacity to see all
