Ten years ago an important political question was agitating the English House of Commons and the English public. It was the old question of Parliamentary Reform in a new shape. Thirty years before Lord John Russell had pleaded the right of the middle classes to have a voice in the election of their Parliamentary representatives; this time he was asserting a similar right for the working population. Then he had to contend against the opposition of the aristocracy only; this time he had to fight against the combined antagonism of the aristocracy and the middle classes, the latter having made common cause with their old enemies to preserve a monopoly of their new privileges. The debate in the House of Commons on the proposed Reform Bill of 1860 was long and bitter. When it was reaching its height, a speaker arose on the Tory side of the House whose appearance on the scene of the debate lent a new and piquant interest to the night's discussion. He sat on the front bench of the Opposition, quite near to Disraeli himself. The moment he rose, every head craned forward to see him; the moment he began to speak, every ear was strained with keen curiosity to hear him. The ears were for a while sorely tried and perplexed. What was he saying--nay, what language was he speaking? What extraordinary, indescribable sounds were those which were heard issuing from his lips? Were they articulate sounds at all? For some minutes certainly those who like myself had never heard the speaker before were utterly bewildered. We could only hear what seemed to us an incoherent, inarticulate guttural jabber, like the efforts at speech of somebody with a mutilated tongue or excided palate. Anything like it I never heard before or since; for no subsequent listening to the same speaker ever produced nearly the same impression: either he had greatly improved in elocution, or his listener had grown used to him. But the night of this famous speech, nothing could have exceeded the extraordinary nature of the sensations produced on those who heard the orator for the first time. After a while we began to detect articulate sounds; then we guessed at and recognized words; then whole sentences began to shape themselves out of the guttural fag; and at last we grew to understand that, with an elocution the most defective and abominable ever possessed by mortal orator, this Tory speaker was really delivering a speech of astonishing brilliancy, ingenuity, and power. The sentences had a magnificent, almost majestic rotundity, energy, and power; they reminded one of something cut out of solid and glittering marble, at once so dazzling and so impressive. The speech was from first to last an aristocratic argument against the fitness of the working man to be anything but a political serf. In the true fashion of the aristocrat, the speaker was for patronizing the working man in every possible way; behaving to him as a kind and