The Whigs have triumphed all along the line. The Tories have not only been beaten, they have been absorbed. A process has gone on like that described by Macaulay as following on the Norman invasion, when men gradually ceased to call themselves Saxon and Norman and proudly boasted of being English. The difference in the case before us is that while the Tories have accepted the whole of the Whig principles they still abjure the Whig name. No so-called Conservative to-day will venture on opposing an extension of the franchise on the plain ground of principle. At most he will but temporise and plead for delay. No blush of conscious inconsistency suffused Mr. Ritchie’s swarthy features when introducing his “frankly democratic” Local Government Bill. And rightly not; for he was doing no violence to party principles. In the matter of the functions of the State, the absorption of the Tory is not quite so obvious, because there never has been, and, as long as society lasts, never can be, a _parti serieux_ of logical _laisser faire_. Even in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, the difference between the two great parties was mainly one of tendency--of attitude of mind. The Tory had a certain affection for the State--a natural self-love: the Whig distrusted it. This distrust is now the sentiment of the whole of our public men. They see, some of them perhaps more clearly than others, that there is much the State must do; but they all wish that much to be as little as possible. Even when, driven by an irresistible force which they feel but do not understand (which none but the Socialist does or can understand), they bring forward measures for increasing the power of the whole over the part, their arguments are always suffused in a sickly halo of apology: their gestures are always those of timorous deprecation and fretful diffidence. They are always nervously anxious to explain that the proposal violates no principle of political economy, and with them political economy means, not Professor Sidgwick, but Adam Smith. The reason why this unanimity of all prominent politicians on great fundamental principles is not manifest to the mind of the average man is that, although there is nothing left to get hot or even moderately warm about, the political temperature is as high as ever. It is not in the dust of the arena, but only in the repose of the auditorium that one is able to realise that men will fight as fiercely and clapper-claw each other as spitefully over a dry bone as over a living principle. One has to stand aside awhile to see that politicians are like the theological controversialists of whom Professor Seeley somewhere says that they never get so angry with each other as when their differences are almost imperceptible, except perhaps when they are quite so.