In connection with this legislative dealing with the endowed colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the principle may be said to have been practically adopted, though not formally laid down, that, after the lapse of fifty years from the death of a Founder, the Legislature may deal freely with all his regulations, saving the main object of his foundation. The assumption that the wills of Founders were for ever inviolable, in spite of the lapse of ages and the total change of circumstances, had led, as it must always lead, to a perpetuity of perversion and to the defeat of the main object of the Founders themselves. He who in his youth had won the favour of the most bigoted of Tory patrons and entrance to public life by his rhetorical opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832, was destined in his maturity to father a Reform Bill at the thought of which the reformers of 1832 would have shuddered. The Reform Bill of 1832 had enfranchised the middle-class, but by abolishing the scot-and-lot borough, had deprived the working-class of the little representation which it possessed. Moreover, the legislative preponderance of the landed interest, which had the House of Lords to itself and a large section of the Commons, was too great for the general good. These were the best reasons for an extension of the suffrage, while the Whig party and its leader Russell, perhaps, as is the way of parties, finding their sails flapping against the mast, wished to raise a little popular wind. It is by the bidding of parties against each other for popularity, largely, that the suffrage has been extended. Russell had for some time been busy with reform, and had more than once moved in that direction, but had been deftly put aside by Palmerston, who, though a Liberal by profession, and revolutionary or affecting that character in foreign affairs, was in home politics a Tory at heart, and met general assertions of the right of men to the suffrage as “partakers of our flesh and blood” and presumptively entitled to a place “within the pale of the constitution,” with the aphorism that “the one right of every man, woman, and child was to be well governed.” It could not be said that the reform agitation, at all events south of Birmingham, was very strong. The large measure of extension brought in by Gladstone was opposed, in some very memorable speeches, by Robert Lowe, a high aristocrat not of birth but of intellect, who made the last stand against democracy and in favour of government by mind. He and his section, dubbed by regular party men “the Cave of Adullam,” helped Disraeli to kill the Bill. Disraeli then brought in and carried a Bill, not less radical, of his own, to which the Conservative gentry under the party whip, styled by Disraeli “education,” lent a doleful support; while Robert Lowe appealed to their consistency almost with tears, but in vain. Disraeli thus carried off the popularity of the measure, and enabled himself to say that the Tories were the