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“The Whigs are a class with all the selfish prejudices and all the vices of a class; the Radicals are a sect with all the grinding tyranny and all the debasing fanaticism of a sect.” Those words are as true to-day as they were when Lord Randolph Churchill spoke them nearly twenty years ago. Indeed all that has happened since has tended to make the Whigs more selfishly “class-conscious” and the Radicals more debasingly sectarian.

It may be retorted that the Tories are no better equipped for the art of statesmanship. I assent; but I say that on the whole they are less positively dangerous. For one thing the very cloudiness of their political outlook renders them to a great extent amenable to skilful and systematic pressure from genuine reformers. It is often possible to get them to pass good measures without knowing it, as Mr. Webb and Mr. Morant are supposed to have induced them to pass an Education Bill which would have been rejected with unanimity by the Cabinet, the Conservative Party, the House of Lords and all three Houses of Convocation, had its real excellence been perceived by those bodies. Also the Tories have not always in their pockets that dilapidated bundle of red herrings (the Church, the Lords, etc), which the Radicals produce periodically whenever the electorate has to be deluded. But, when all has been said, it must be confessed that there is little to be hoped from the Tories just now. They had their chance in 1895, when they came into power on the cry of “Social Reform.” Had they fulfilled their pledges then, we should never have had to face the terror of a Gladstonian resurrection. But they failed; and the great Tory revival which Randolph Churchill inaugurated has ended in a pageant of fashionable incompetence above, and frivolous Jingoism (inexpressibly disquieting to serious Imperialists) below, the wires being pulled vigorously meanwhile by the unclean hands of Hebrew Finance—a sight that would have made Churchill sick at heart.