the principle of liberty and freedom of exchange as the true solvents of the economic problems of the day. This policy remained in force during the ministry of Sir R. Peel and lasted right down to the time of the great budgets of Mr. Gladstone. If we might venture, therefore, to add another to the definitions of Montesquieu, we might say that the principle animating a liberal constitutional government was liberty, and that this involved a definite plan for enlarging the sphere of liberty as the organising principle of civil society. To what then are we to impute the decadence from this type into which parliamentary government seems now to have fallen? Can we attribute this to neglect or to exaggeration of its animating principle, as suggested in the formula of Montesquieu? It is a question which the reader may find leisure to investigate; we confine ourselves to marking what seem to be some of the stages of decay. When the forces of destructive radicalism had done their legitimate work, it seemed a time for rest and patience, for administration rather than for fresh legislation and for a pause during which the principles of liberty and free exchange might have been left to organise the equitable distribution of the inevitably increasing wealth of the country. The patience and the conviction which were needed to allow of such a development, rightly or wrongly, were not forthcoming, and politicians and parties have not been wanting to give effect to remedies hastily suggested to and adopted by the people. Political leaders soon came to realise that recent enfranchisements had added a new electorate for whom philosophical principles had no charm. At a later date also, Mr. Gladstone, yielding to a powerful and not over-scrupulous political agitation, suddenly determined to attempt a great constitutional change in the relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland. Whether the transference of the misgovernment of Ireland from London to Dublin would have had results as disastrous or as beneficial as disputants have asserted, may be matter for doubt, but the manner in which the proposal was made certainly had one unfortunate consequence. Mr. Gladstone's action struck a blow at the independence and self-respect, or as M. Faguet terms it, the moral competence of our parliamentary representation from which it has never recovered. Men were called on to abandon, in the course of a few hours, opinions which they had professed for a lifetime and this not as the result of conviction but on the pressure of party discipline. Political feeling ran high. The "Caucus" was called into more active operation. Political parties began to invent programmes to capture the groundlings. The conservative party, relinquishing its useful function of critic, revived the old policy of eleemosynary doles, and, in an unlucky moment for its future, has encumbered itself with an advocacy of the policy of protection. For