suffrage was brought before the House, he would have allowed any class who had boldly avowed their determination to obtain predominance to take up and settle that question?...” Nor let him be misconstrued in his views of the ancestral temperament of the Whigs. Nothing is more remarkable in the chronicle of combinations than the fact that for more than a century a party, the most exclusive in its operation, was considered the least. The recent publications of the Portland and Harley Papers establish beyond a doubt that while the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne were in large measure a commercial syndicate that “made a corner” in power, the old Whigs of George III. were an aristocratic oligarchy that subverted rule, both popular and personal, and monopolised government. “How an oligarchy,” says Disraeli, in the preface to _Lothair_, “had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular. What has mainly led to this confusion of public thought, and this uneasiness of society, _is our habitual carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application_. The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle, that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty, is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it government sinks into police and a nation is degraded into a mob.” And he continues with reference to the Toryism of a later period: “... Those who in theory were the national party, and who sheltered themselves under the institutions of the country against the oligarchy, had, both by a misconception and a neglect of their duties, become, and justly become, odious; while the oligarchy ... had, by the patronage of certain general principles which they only meagrely applied, assumed, and to a certain degree acquired, the character of a popular party. _But no party was national; one was exclusive and odious, and the other liberal and cosmopolitan._”