Since the grand organic change that was effected thirty years ago, there has been no strong and stable government in England. Lord Grey went out of office because he could not keep his party together. The King, under the spurring of his wife, made an effort to play the part of his father in 1783, with Peel for Pitt, and was beaten. Peel was floored, and Lord Melbourne became Premier again; and though he held office six years, he never had a working majority in the Commons, nor a majority of any kind in the Peers. The largest majorities that he could command in the lower House would have been considered something like very weak support in the ante-Reform times, and would have caused the ministers of those times to resign themselves to resignation. When the Tories came back to power, in 1841, with about one hundred majority in the Commons, they thought they were secure for a decade at least; but in a few months they found they were not secure of even their own chief; and in five years they were compelled to abandon protection, and to consent to the death and burial of their own party, which was denied even the honor of embalmment, young Conservatism being nothing but old Toryism, and therefore it was beyond even the power of spices to prolong its decay. It had rotted of the potato-rot, and the League's powerful breath blew it over. The Whigs returned to office, but not to power, the Russell Government proving a most ridiculous concern, and living through only five years of rickety rule. A spasmodic Tory Government, that discarded Tory principles, endured for less than a year, not even the vigorous intellect of the Earl of Derby, seconded though it was by the genius of Disraeli, being sufficient to insure it a longer term of existence. Then came the Aberdeen Ministry, a regular coalition concern, a no-party government, and necessarily so, because all parties but the extreme Tories were represented in it, and were engaged in neutralizing each other. How could there be a party government, or, indeed, for long a government of any kind, by a ministry in which were such men as Aberdeen and Russell, Palmerston and Grahame, Gladstone and Clarendon, all pigging together in the same truckle-bed, to use Mr. Burke's figure concerning the mixture that was called the Chatham Ministry? The coalition went to pieces on the Russian rock, having managed the war much worse than any American Administration ever mismanaged one. The Palmerston Government followed, and has existed ever since, deducting the fifteen months that the second Derby-Disraeli Ministry lasted; but the Palmerston Ministry has seldom had a majority in Parliament, and has lived, partly through the forbearance of its foes, partly through the support of men who are neither its friends nor its enemies, and partly through the personal popularity of its vigorous old chief, who is as lively at seventy-eight as he was at forty-five, when he was a Canningite.