As a rule in England, the Minister who dissolves Parliament and appeals to the country is beaten. The General Election of 1857 was a startling exception to that rule. For Palmerston it was a complete victory. For his opponents it was not a defeat--but a rout. Cobden, Bright, Gibson, Fox, and Miall were rejected by the very men whose fortunes they had made by their Free Trade policy. As Mr. Morley says, “nothing had been seen like it since the disappearance of the Peace Whigs in 1812, when Brougham, Tierney, Lamb, and Horner all lost their seats.”[310] The Peelites suffered almost as cruelly. The Conservative ranks were sadly thinned, for twenty-four counties were won by the Ministry; in fact, the _Times_ declared, that the Tories would “never again, as a party, become candidates for office.”[311] The “Manchester School” lost its supporters, (1), because it had got the reputation of factiously opposing all Governments; (2), because the manufacturers, enriched by Free Trade, had ceased to be Radical; and (3), because they thought that when Palmerston forced Bowring into Canton at the point of the bayonet, cotton goods would go in with him. The Peelites were beaten (1), because they were divided among themselves; and (2), because they were a small faction, and in a General Election a small faction generally is crushed in the collision between the great parties. The Tories lost adherents (1), because the farmers resented their support of an amendment moved by their natural enemy, Mr. Cobden; and (2), because rumours were spread abroad by Lord Palmerston’s agents that they were about to coalesce with Mr. Gladstone, who represented the principles of “the traitor Peel.” Lord Palmerston triumphed (1), because his only Liberal rival, Lord John Russell, had alienated the country by his tortuous disloyalty to two Ministries, and incurred the hatred of the Dissenters by his defence of Church Rates; (2), because his personal popularity, after bringing the wars with Russia and Persia to an end, was unbounded; and (3), because he and his satellites poured forth speeches, inflated with cheap and vulgar “patriotic” claptrap, to such an extent that even Mr. Greville says in his “Memoirs” that he was “disgusted at the enormous and shameful lying with which the country is deluged.”[312] England, moreover, was involved in a war with China, and after all Palmerston was the only political leader who had proved that he could carry on a war with least discredit to the country.[313] The election was, therefore, a personal one. Constituents did not scrutinise closely the principles or capacity of candidates, so long as they promised to support Lord Palmerston,[314] and so numbers of Parliamentary Reformers crept unnoticed into the House. But in such cases the loyalty of a majority lasts no longer than the popularity of the leader. Let him make one false step that forfeits popularity, and then his supporters desert him,