Earth's choicest youth fierce rushing to the slaughter That two crowned Fools may wreak their idiot pet; Or wiser Christians' blood poured out like water, That Jews may gamble with a nation's debt. Will that day's Patriot be a mouthing truckler, Setting proud Freedom's hymn to Freedom's dirge; Will Law be still the rich man's shield and buckler, The good man's terror, and the poor man's scourge? Will you find Life a hot and blindfold scrimmage, Men straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold; And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old? Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit, Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed; Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit, When Lies shall fail--the first time, and the last? Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder-- Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad; Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder-- "An undevout Astronomer is mad." THE ROAD TO REFORM Turning from England's international outlook to home affairs, we are confronted in the earlier stages of the period under review by the powerful negative influence of Lord Palmerston. A great Foreign Minister, a capable and humane administrator when he was at the Home Office, he had little belief in legislative remedies, and his refusal to grapple with Reform became progressively distasteful to his Liberal supporters. The old party system had been confused and shattered by the secession of the Peelites, as the result of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and Palmerston was maintained in power in fact, if not in name, by a coalition. His death ended the _régime_ of masterly inactivity and cleared the way for the reconstruction of parties and the prolonged duel between the two great protagonists--Disraeli and Gladstone. The Reform Bill of 1867, the chief constructive achievement of Disraeli's first Premiership, was a great advance on that of 1832, but the boon was robbed of much of its grace by the party strategy which was summed up in Lord Derby's famous phrase about "dishing the Whigs." Meanwhile Ireland had been forced into prominence by the outbreak of Fenianism, the Liberals had been reunited under Gladstone by his Irish Church policy and on his accession to power in 1868, we enter on the golden age of Gladstonian finance, with a low income tax--it dropped to 3d. in the year 1873--high wages and industrial prosperity. [Sidenote: _Labour and Intervention_] It was also, as we have seen, the age of non-intervention in foreign politics. Strange to say the strongest appeal to the Government to interfere by force of arms in a foreign quarrel was made by a deputation of working men, introduced by Professor Beesly, in May, 1863, with a view to expounding to the Prime Minister the resolutions in favour of Poland voted by a Trade Union Meeting in St. James's Hall:--