How, then, do the Tories exist as a party? How do they continue to believe themselves to be Tories, and speak of themselves as Tories, when they have surrendered all, or nearly all, the great principles which are the creed and faith, and business of Toryism? Because they have, in our times, never had Tories for leaders. A man is not a Tory merely because he fights the Tory battles, any more than a captain of the Irish Brigade was a Frenchman because he fought for King Louis, or Hobart Pasha is a Turk because he commands the Ottoman navy. The Tory party has always, of late years, had to call in the aid of brilliant outsiders, political renegades, refugees from broken-down agitations, disappointed and cynical deserters from the Liberal camp, or mere adventurers, to fight their battles for them. It used to be quite a curious sight, some three or four years ago, when the Tories were, as they are now again, in opposition, to look down from the gallery of the House of Commons and see the men who did gladiatorial duty for the party. Along the back benches, above and below the "gangway," were stretched out huge at length the stalwart, handsome, manly country gentlemen, the bone and sinew of the Tory party--the only real Tories to be found in the House. But _they_ did not bear the brunt of debate. They could cheer splendidly, and vote in platoons; but you don't suppose they were just the sort of men to confront Gladstone, and reply to Bright? Not they; and they knew it. There sat Disraeli, the brilliant renegade from Radicalism, who was ready to think for them and talk for them: and who were his lieutenants? Cairns, the successful, adroit, eloquent lawyer, a North of Ireland man, with about as much of the genuine British Tory in him as there is in Disraeli himself; Seymour Fitzgerald, the clever, pushing Irishman, also a lawyer; Whiteside, the voluble, eloquent, rather boisterous advocate, also a lawyer, and also an Irishman; smart, saucy Pope Hennessy, a young Irish adventurer, who had taken up with Toryism and ultramontanism as the best way of making a career, and who would, at the slightest hint from his chief, have risen, utterly ignorant of the subject under debate, and challenged Gladstone's finance or Roundel Palmer's law. These men, and such men--these and no others--did the debating and the fighting for the great Tory party of England at a most critical period of that party's existence. Needless to say that the party who were compelled by their own poverty of idea, their own stupidity, to have these men for their representatives, were stupid enough to be led anywhere and into anything by the force of a little dexterity and daring on the part of the one man into whose hands they had confided their destinies.