The majority is in the hands of the Conservative party, the Liberal party having only enjoyed the sweets of power for a brief period after the passing of the Financial Reform Bill; but the principle of representation keeps down any inclination toward the inevitable jobberies of a close self-elected body, and pushes local legislators on, quite up to the mark of the public opinion of the locality they govern. A stranger, who has no interest in party squabbles, must confess that the funds of this wealthy estate are on the whole fairly and wisely distributed. The Irish population, amounting to many thousands of the poorest and most ignorant class, who find a refuge from the miseries of their own country in the first port from Dublin, and employment in the vast demand for unskilled labour caused by the perpetual movement in imports and exports, impose a heavy tax on the poor-rates and police-rates of this borough. In the education of this part of the community, the Liberal Corporation made provision in the extensive Corporation schools, by adopting the Irish Government scheme of instruction, permitting the Roman Catholics to make use of their own translation of the Bible, and to absent themselves from the religious instruction of the orthodox. On this question the municipal elections were fought. The general education party were eventually beaten. The Roman Catholics were withdrawn from the schools, and thrown entirely upon the priests or the streets for education, and great was the rejoicing among the party who carried a large wooden Bible as their standard. But subsequent events have induced those who have given any attention to the state of the operative classes in Liverpool, of whatever politics, to doubt whether it would not have been better to have been busy, for the last fifteen years, in teaching those classes something, who, knowing nothing, supply very expensive customers to the Liverpool courts of law and jail. Liverpool returns two members to the House of Commons. The election contests were formerly wonderfully bitter and absurd, for on one occasion, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, nearly two hundred thousand pounds were spent by two parties, between whose politics there was scarcely a shade of difference.