mixed Constitution is now so demonstrated, that every man may now say what he thinks publicly and without reserve. Even men who have been all their lives supporters of the “Liberal” party—men who, up to the last moment, were in favour of a farther degradation of the franchise—now see the folly of their course, and, moreover, have an excuse for avowing their change of opinion. Hence it is that England is now all of one mind. And what is that, we repeat, but that all England is Conservative, and that the Liberal party in office is an anachronism? There might be some excuse for this anomalous position of affairs, if the Liberal Ministry ever professed to believe that Liberal principles are still popular. But they do not—they cannot. After nearly ten years of selfish and most reckless trafficking in Reform Bills, Lord Russell himself repudiated his own work. He abandoned it in the same spirit of selfishness as he took it up. It was in the hope of reviving his faded popularity that he first proposed a further Reform Bill in the end of 1851; and, backed by a party as insincere as himself, he kept playing off his precious Bill, year after year, as a convenient party manœuvre against his Conservative rivals. But no sooner, when reinstated in office, did he and his colleagues find that they were about to be “hoist with their own petard,” than the Bill was shelved. Reform was not only abandoned, but treated with contempt by the Whig occupants of the Treasury Bench; and the Minister who had once shed tears when forced by his colleagues to postpone his Bill, at length, on the 5th of February 1861, not only buried Reform, but, like a wild Irishman, danced upon its grave! In their projects of ecclesiastical innovation, the members of the present Ministry have been equally defeated. When baffled in their attacks upon the State, they still thought it was a popular thing to assault the Church. In this also they have at length been undeceived: and now what have they left to do? They have not a single card left to play. Their whole list of measures, after having been deliberately considered by the nation, has been condemned and rejected with contempt. Like the Federal generals at Fredericksburg, they have tried attack after attack upon every part of their rivals’ position, and with every man they could muster, only to see every attack fail, and recoil in ruinous loss upon themselves. The Federal general, when condemned to inaction and menaced by a superior force, wisely abandoned his ground, and put a river between himself and his foe. It is time the Whig Ministry should execute a similar “strategic movement,” if they do not wish to fare worse than General Burnside, and be kicked across the Rappahannock, instead of avoiding a catastrophe by a timely retreat.