During the years which had passed since the new Parliament had met, the working-class supporters of the Conservative party, particularly in the great towns, had come to look with especial favour upon Lord Randolph Churchill. To these were added a considerable defection from those who had hitherto counted themselves Liberals. He touched the imagination of the English people; and he appealed especially to their youth. ‘The young men of England,’ he exclaimed, ‘are joining the Tory party in great numbers. The youth of England is on our side.’ He was, indeed, soon forced to defend himself from the assumption ‘that any expression of opinion from a person who has no claim to the monumental age of 101, is a breach of decorum, almost an act of indecency, and an indication of incurable vice.’ ‘Youth,’ he said (Edinburgh, December 20, 1883), ‘is no doubt a great calamity, and it appears to excite all the worst passions of human nature among those who no longer possess it. But we may, I think, chase away such depressing reflections by remembering that youth is a calamity which grows less bitter and less poignant as the years go by, and that by the sheer and simple process of living and survival we must, each in our turn, approach the summit of the wave.’ By the end of 1882 he was already unquestionably the most popular speaker in the Conservative party. In 1884 and 1885 he equalled, if he did not surpass, Mr. Gladstone himself in the interest and enthusiasm which his personality aroused. Wherever he went he was received by tremendous throngs and with extraordinary demonstrations of goodwill. In times when good Conservatives despaired of the fortunes of their party under a democratic franchise and even, making a virtue of necessity, regarded it as almost immoral to court a working-class vote, and when the chiefs of Toryism looked upon the resisting powers of small shop and lodging-house keepers, of suburban villadom, and of the genial and seductive publican as almost the only remaining bulwarks of the Constitution, Lord Randolph Churchill boldly enlisted the British nation in defence of Church and State. At a time when Liberal orators and statesmen, ‘careering about the country,’ as Lord Randolph described them, ‘calling themselves “the people of England,”’ were looking forward to an election which should relegate the Conservative party to the limbo of obsolete ideas, they were disconcerted by the spectacle, repeatedly presented, of multitudes of working men hanging upon the words of a young aristocrat; and Radicals, bidding higher and higher to catch the popular fancy, heard with disgust the loudest acclamations of the crowd accorded to Lord Randolph Churchill as he denounced ‘the Moloch of Midlothian’[13] or ‘the pinchbeck Robespierre’[14] for war and tyranny beyond the sea, profusion and misgovernment at home.