Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days. In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping a _salon_, giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings, and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the "three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, and confusion." When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone--that stiffest of social conservatives--exclaimed, "Mrs. W----, forsooth! I have known much greater ladies than Mrs. W---- quite content to look down through the ventilator." XLV TOWN _V._ COUNTRY I said at the outset that I am a Whig _pur sang_; and the historic Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion, the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments." This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home. In those days the tradition of Duty required people who had several country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof--sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home. People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of the Hall or the Manor.