Nevertheless, the ferment of political and social life had seldom been greater. A Royal wedding in the near future was supposed to account for the vigor of London's social pulse; the streets, indeed, were already putting up poles and decorations. And a general election, expected in the autumn, if not before, accounted for the vivacity of the clubs, the heat of the newspapers, and the energy of the House of Commons, where all-night sittings were lightly risked by the Government and recklessly challenged by the Opposition. Everybody was playing to the gallery--_i.e._, the country. Old members were wooing their constituencies afresh; young candidates were spending feverish energies on new hazards, and anxiously inquiring at what particular date in the campaign tea-parties became unlawful. Great issues were at stake; for old parties were breaking up under the pressure of new interests and passions; within the Liberal party the bubbling of new faiths was at its crudest and hottest; and those who stood by the slow and safe ripening of Freedom, from "precedent to precedent," were in much anxiety as to what shape or shapes might ultimately emerge from a brew so strong and heady. Which only means that now, as always, Whigs and Radicals were at odds; and the "unauthorized programme" of the day was sending its fiery cross through the towns and the industrial districts of the north. A debate of some importance was going on in the House of Commons. The Tory Government had brought in a Land Bill, intended, no doubt, rather as bait for electors than practical politics. It was timid and ill-drafted, and the Opposition, in days when there were still some chances in debate, joyously meant to kill it, either by frontal attack or by obstruction. But, in the opinion of the Left Wing of the party, the chief weapon of its killing should be the promise of a much larger and more revolutionary measure from the Liberal side. The powerful Right Wing, however, largely represented on the front bench, held that you could no more make farmers than saints by Act of Parliament, and that only by slow and indirect methods could the people be drawn back to the land. There was, in fact, little difference between them and the front bench opposite, except a difference in method; only the Whig brains were the keener; and in John Ferrier the Right Wing had a personality and an oratorical gift which the whole Tory party admired and envied. There had been a party meeting on the subject of the Bill, and Ferrier and the front bench had, on the whole, carried the indorsement of their policy. But there was an active and discontented minority, full of rebellious projects for the general election.