Mr. Blank and I have political opinions which pass, for convenience, under a common label. Yet there are few men in England whose attitude of mind towards his alleged principles I more cordially loathe. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I think him a hypocrite. But he has chosen the side which is mine, and I cannot prevent his saying a hundred things which I believe. We will suppose that Mr. Blank is a far honester fellow than I am able to think him. Still, and at the best, he is a sort of composite photograph of your average Member of Parliament--the type of man to whom Great Britain commits the direction of her affairs and, by consequence, her well-doing and her well-being and her honour. Liberal or Conservative, are not the features pretty much the same? a solid man, well past fifty, who has spent the prime of his life in business and withdrawn from it with a good reputation and a credit balance equally satisfactory to himself and his bankers. Or it may be that he has not actually retired but has turned to politics to fill up those leisure hours which are the reward or vexation (as he chooses to look at them) of a prosperous man of business; for, as Bagehot pointed out, the life of a man of business who employs his own capital, and employs it nearly always in the same way, is by no means fully employed. "If such a man is very busy, it is a sign of something wrong. Either he is working at detail, which subordinates would do better, or he is engaged in too many speculations." In consequence our commerce abounds with men of great business ability and experience who, being short of occupation, are glad enough to fill up their time with work in Parliament, as well as proud to write M.P. after their names. For my part I can think of nothing better calculated to reassure anyone whose dreams are haunted by apprehensions of wild-cat legislative schemes, or the imminence of a Radical millennium, than five minutes' contemplation of our champions of progress as they recline together, dignified and whiskered and bland, upon the benches of St. Stephen's.