Mr. Bright advised his audience at Birmingham to read over again the speeches of Mr. Charles Villiers on Free Trade made fifty years ago. I advise them to do nothing of the kind, because if they do they will lose every shred of veneration and respect which they still may feel for the name of Mr. Bright. They will find that the great battle of Free Trade, of which Mr. Bright has never been tired of boasting loud and long, was fought by Mr. Charles Villiers long before Mr. Bright made his appearance in public; that Mr. Charles Villiers bore the burden and heat of that protracted and lengthened contest; and when Mr. Villiers had won the day Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden stepped in and tried to rob him of all his glory. All those who read Mr. Charles Villiers’s speeches will find that Mr. Bright and his dear friend Mr. Cobden were nothing more nor less than two plundering cuckoos, who shamefully ejected Mr. Charles Villiers from the nest which he had constructed, and who reared therein their own chattering and silly brood. (Woodstock, January 31, 1884.) After all this the Fair Traders were not unnaturally inclined to complain when in 1887--three years afterwards--Lord Randolph Churchill having acquired a responsible position, having studied the report of the Commission on Trade appointed largely at his insistence in 1885, having reflected upon the voting of the counties in the General Election, and surveyed the problems of finance from the Treasury chambers, poured buckets of cold water on their cherished schemes and declined to make any exertions in their support. But the central proposition of the Tory Democratic idea was that the Conservative party was willing and thoroughly competent to deal with the needs of democracy and the multiplying problems of modern life; and that the British Constitution, so far from being incompatible with the social progress of the great mass of the people, was in itself a flexible instrument by which that progress might be guided and secured.