support each Minister whatever may be his failure in duty. Personal aptitude might be considered in the elections to the offices, whereas at present little can be considered beyond the necessity of providing for all the leaders, and a good financier or Minister of Marine would not be turned out because he was in the minority on a Franchise Bill. The nations have been so much engaged in taking authority out of bad hands, that they have forgotten that it is a good and necessary thing in itself. Government has become dangerously weak. The greater part of its energy is now expended, not in the work of administration, but in preserving its own existence. Not only is it exposed to the incessant attacks of an Opposition whose business is to traduce and harass it, but it is now hardly able to sustain itself against the irresponsible power of the press, wielded nobody knows by whom, but often under secret influences, which are a great and growing danger in all communities. To keep the popular favor, which is to them the breath of life, the members of the Cabinet have to be always on the stump, reserving to themselves little time for rest or reflection, and the stump orator is rapidly superseding the statesman. This vacillation of policy on the Egyptian question, the consequences of which all have been deploring, has not been so much that of the Government as that of the nation itself worrying and distracting the Government through the press. A country with an Empire and a world-wide diplomacy cannot afford to have an Executive, the policy of which is always shifting with the wind of opinion, and which can exercise no forecast, because it is not sure of its existence for an hour. In India, the danger is not so much from native disaffection as from British agitation, which the Company managed to exclude, but which, since India has been driven into the vortex of British politics, a party Government has no power to control. Those who are as far as is the writer of this paper from being Imperialists, must see, nevertheless, that while the Empire exists it creates a special necessity for a strong and undemagogic Government, and that on any hypothesis, a disruption, or general dissolution from a collapse of the central authority, is not the thing to be desired. The Radicals themselves are saying that what the country now wants is a strong government, by which, however, people often mean a government strongly imbued with their own ideas.