Then comes the grand moment of your life. You are shovelled into the Cabinet on account of services rendered. From this point, if you possess any ability at all, you can have things pretty much your own way; and if your ambition has been to hear yourself called "My lord" before you die, and to see your wife in the Peeresses' Gallery on great occasions, and your sons swanking about town with "Hon." before their names, you can manage it. It is a slow job, and it involves many years of hard work and lavish expenditure; but it is politically possible in England for a man to be born on the flags and to die properly set forth in Burke and Debrett. I do not say for a moment that the end and aim of every English politician is the peerage; but I do say that, as a rule, his labours are directed towards some end of honour or emolument, and seldom or never to the good of the State. It is ambition, and not patriotism, that fires his bosom; it is self-aggrandisement, and not a desire for the welfare of the English people, that keeps him going; and it is party, and not principle, that guides and rules his legislative actions. Of course, the great art of being a politician is to hide these facts from the public. If you went down to your constituency like an honest man and said, "Gentlemen, I wish you to return me to Parliament in order that I may make a high position for myself, in order that I may become a man of rank and the founder of a family," your constituency would hurl dead cats at you. Therefore you go down with an altogether different tale: "I am going to the House of Commons, gentlemen, in your interests and not in mine. It will cost me large sums of money; besides which, as your member, I shall be expected to subscribe to all the local cricket clubs. But I have the best interests of Muckington at heart; and, if you honour me by making me your representative, money is no object." It is a wonderful business, and a great and a glorious. One stands in astonishment before the bright English intelligence which takes so much on promise and gets so little performed. An English party never goes into power with the intention of doing more than half of what it has promised to do. At election times its great business is to capture votes: these must be had at any price short of rank bribery. And, once landed with the blest, the party immediately settles down, not to the work of carrying out its promises, but to the far more serious business of keeping itself in power. From the point of view of the careless lay-observer, the House of Commons is an assemblage for the discussion of Imperial affairs, with a view to their being managed in the best possible way. To the politician it is just an arena in which two sets of greedy men meet to annoy, thwart, ridicule, and bring about the downfall of each other.