We have said that there is one exception to the unanimity of political
feeling which now pervades this country, and that exception, we need
hardly say, is the party of Radicals whose mouthpiece is Mr Bright. We
can no longer call this the “Manchester” party; for, whatever may have
been their sentiments hitherto, we have reason to believe that the views
of Mr Bright are now repudiated by the greater part even of our
manufacturing classes. But Mr Bright is incurable. All his life he has
been a man of one idea, and one-ideaed he must be to the end. There must
always be men of this kind. We must lay our account to have Radicals.
Like the poor, they are always with us. And they are not without use in
their way. This is a free country, and a few eloquent or blustering
Radicals serve to “let off the steam” of their class, and serve to
remind the sober-minded portion of the community what a very mad and
drunken thing Radicalism is. Mr Bright and his followers may hold a
place in political England as usefully as the drunken Helots did in the
social usages of Sparta. But though we have no great zeal for the
conversion of this Abbot of Unreason and his motley followers, we think
the country will agree with us that they ought not to be taken by the
hand by those in high places, and allowed to play their pranks in the
government of the country. Yet this is just what must happen in the
present anomalous position of parties. The country has no objection to
hear Mr Bright speak on any subject and in any way he likes, either in
or out of Parliament; but it cannot regard with indifference a position
of affairs which makes his support indispensable to the existence of a
Ministry. The Tories are not only the strongest party in Parliament, but
now equal in number the Whigs and Radicals put together. By a slow and
steady growth the Conservative party is regaining the predominant
position which it held from 1842 to 1847, when a question, not of
constitutional but of commercial policy, so lamentably disrupted its
power. Now, as in 1841, the Whig Ministry is at its mercy, and is only
spared for the sake of the gallant old statesman who heads the motley
crew, and is worth all the others put together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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