It is amusing to see the subterfuges by which the Whigs seek to conceal their discomfiture. Feeling themselves going downhill very fast, disintegrating, expiring, they cry out that “there are no parties nowadays.” Some of them even go the length of saying that there are “no principles;” the correctness of which statement we shall not dispute as regards themselves. They should know best; and, indeed, as all their old principles are dead and gone, dismissed into the limbo of vanities, we do not see how they can have any left. It is certainly suspicious that the Whigs should have innocently discovered that the age of party is past, at the very time that the Tory party has regained its old ascendancy in the Legislature. Plain people will not be at a loss to assign a reason. The Whigs as a party are extinct, and, like Chesterfield and Tyrawley, “they don’t wish it to be known.” The only thing that can keep the Whigs alive in the imagination of the public, is to show that party is dead. Happily the country has only to look at the Opposition side of the House to see that the Tory party is alive, and exuberant in strength and hope. It is fortunate for the interests of the State that they are so. The main attack upon the bulwarks of the Constitution has been decisively repulsed—the legions of “Reform” have been scattered in such hopeless rout that their leaders have thrown away their standards and disavow their cause. But the fight still goes on against another front of the Constitution, which, until lately, was but ill defended. This combat, so interesting and important, is itself a test of party; and seldom have the organisation and discipline of party been more strikingly displayed than in this keen warfare. Party dead! No, truly. “An opinion has been industriously promulgated of late,” justly observes a contemporary,[12] “that party distinctions have ceased in public life, and that there are no contested principles between the two great political connections of the State. Yet simultaneous with the propagation of this doctrine has been the most systematic and successful assault in Parliament upon the Church of England that it has encountered since 1640.” Repulsed from the political front of the Constitution, the waves of combat still dash furiously against our religious institutions. It is time that the Conservatives should overthrow the enemies of the Constitution in this quarter also by a decisive victory. It will be their crowning triumph. In truth there is no other beyond it. When they have terminated this combat, the Conservative triumph is complete in the Legislature, as it already is in the country. The Church is part and parcel of the British Constitution; and very heartily do we approve of our ecclesiastical contemporary’s exhortations to Churchmen to look after their special interests. The Church is a party question, like any other; and in the intense competition of a constitutional country, the