In his resolve to spread the franchise in his own manner, and to neutralise the revolutionary bias of agitators and secret societies, he never lost sight of the growing force of public opinion. He himself was “a gentleman of the press;” in the improved and multiplied newspapers he hailed the great safety-valve afforded to England by that “publicity” on which “the great fabric of political freedom” has been reared. “Free intercourse,” he exclaimed in the ’thirties, “is the spirit of the age!” So late as 1872, he observed, “... That has been the principle of the whole of our policy. First of all, we made our courts of law public, and during the last forty years we have completely emancipated the periodical press of England, which was not literally free before, giving it such power that it throws light upon the life of almost every class in this country, and I might say upon the life of almost every individual.” In the press (the light of which he perhaps valued more than the warmth), he welcomed an antidote against hidden and perilous associations; and believed that if the self-respecting hand-labourer received the vote (as he was entitled to do), he would exercise it in the cause of freedom, of loyalty, and of order. In 1862, he declared “parliamentary discipline founded on its only sure basis, sympathising public opinion,” to be the watchword of his propaganda. The passage summarises much that I have discussed. “... To build up a community, not upon Liberal opinions, which any man may fashion to his fancy, but upon popular principles which assert equal rights, civil and religious; to uphold the institutions of the country because they are the embodiment of the wants and wishes of the nation, and protect us alike from individual tyranny and popular outrage; equally to resist democracy” (as a form of government) “and oligarchy, and to favour that principle of _free aristocracy_ which is the only basis and security for constitutional government; ... to favour popular education, because it is the best guarantee of public order; to defend local government, and to be as jealous of the rights of the working man as of the prerogative of the Crown and the privileges of the senate;--these were once the principles which regulated Tory statesmen (_i.e._ Bolingbroke and Wyndham), and I for one have no wish that the Tory party should ever be in power unless they practise them.” In his great speech during the summer of the following year on “popular principles” and “liberal opinions,” as well as on the introduction of his actual Reform Bill, he gave expression once more to his distinction between “popular privileges” and “democratic rights”--