clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the _Tiers Etat_, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform? Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education, must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question, some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight. The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel, representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about