And yet, I fear, we shall have to accept the Whigs as the lesser of two evils. At least their offences will in the main be negative, while the victory of the Nonconformists means a period of legislation so disastrous that you and I and all advanced reformers will be obliged to cling to the House of Lords as our only bulwark against the appalling flood of reaction. For some time the Nonconformists have been clamouring for the repeal of the admirable Education Acts of 1902-3. They have now begun to clamour for the repeal of the Licensing Act as well. Now, quite apart from the merits of these measures, it is as clear as daylight that all progress will be impossible if every government devotes its time and energies to repealing the measures of its predecessor. This disastrous precedent will be but the first-fruit of a Dissent-driven ministry. Meanwhile our refreshments, our amusements, even our religious observances will be subjected to silly sectarian taboos. Social reform will be hopelessly neglected, while we may have to face a revival of the foolish agitation in favour of Church Disestablishment which even Mr. Chamberlain’s marvellous genius for electioneering could not persuade the country to take very seriously in the eighties. “The Whigs are a class with all the selfish prejudices and all the vices of a class; the Radicals are a sect with all the grinding tyranny and all the debasing fanaticism of a sect.” Those words are as true to-day as they were when Lord Randolph Churchill spoke them nearly twenty years ago. Indeed all that has happened since has tended to make the Whigs more selfishly “class-conscious” and the Radicals more debasingly sectarian.