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factor in a boy's character is hardly recognised and never analysed. It is hard to recognise because it may coexist with the greatest keenness in pursuit of an immediate object. It is only when the object is at a distance that the laziness shows itself; but then it shows itself in a degree which is almost terrifying. A boy cannot be made, of his free will, to choose the greater good in the future in preference to the present lesser good. He may be induced to do so by motives supplied by another's will, but of his own will never. It is only after he has come into his inheritance, in the shape of an ability to apply his reason to the moral problems of life, that he begins to do this; and when he begins to do this he is no longer a boy but a

man.

It is all of a piece, this, with his laziness, analogous on the mental side to the looseness of limb in all young things. When we went our walks abroad we found it impossible to reach the goals of our errands without much loitering by the way. One can perceive now that we made tacit confession of this weakness, for when a man with his solid purposeful trudge passed us, as we tarried searching the road-side hedges for birds or their nests, we would say, one to the other, "Let us keep up with him and try to get there as soon as he." It was no use, however. For a quarter of a mile, perhaps, we would keep on the pedestrian's heels, sorely, no doubt, to his annoyance; but then a chaffinch would fly up off the road or a tit be pecking in the hedgerow, our childish powers of concentration would fail us, and when we had finished with this passing diversion the wayfarer would be far on his road ahead. Measuring distance by the full-grown standard of to-day, one laughs often and often to think of the length of time which we deemed requisite for traversing the distance of a mile, and this not at all by reason

of any weariness of our sturdy little legs, but simply on account of the lightness of our foolish little brains. To all which divers causes the sparrows generally owed an immunity from further persecution when they betook themselves across the back premises of the house to the neighbourhood of the orchard.

Our hunting-grounds at the back of the stables were not exhausted when we had chased the birds away from the pigs' place. The hay, which the pasture-land furnished in the summer, was stored in one large stack within the boundaries of the hedge, part of which served as one side of the pigs' enclosure. Behind the hay-stack, and between it and the hedge, a blackbird was generally pecking among the rubbish at the stack's foot. He gave us little sport. The moment the head of a stalker appeared round the corner of the rick, and long before a catapult could be brought to bear upon him, he would be away, up and over the hedge, like an arrow, with a hysterical laugh of terror which we felt to be affected. This is a very favourite manœuvre of a blackbird, the darting up from the foot of the hedge as you approach him, then the dart downwards on the other side so soon as he has topped the branches; and you hear his wild laugh growing more and more distant as he goes away, low-flying and invisible, to dart into the thickest cover of the hedgerow further on. If he has a nest in your vicinity he will perform a similar acrobatic movement, but will not fly so far. His laugh will break off shorter, and you will hear instead, from a bush at no great distance, his anxious chuckle of alarm. If you do not move away, his alarm will grow more intolerable, his chuckle louder, until it does not permit him to remain concealed, but he must needs hop up from his hiding-place to see

what you are doing, restlessly flit ting from branch to branch, telling you (foolish bird!) as plainly as a bird can tell it, that you are hard by his nest on which his mate, perhaps, is sitting, almost within arm's length of you, motionless, silent, but watching you with an intently anxious

eye.

Joe always knew what the birds were saying, and it was he who taught their language to us. None of the other people about us understood a word of it; it was no wonder that we gave them no credit for knowing anything about the weather. How could a boy be expected to have faith in people some of whom actually believed, on the strength of a foolish nursery story, that Jenny Wren was the consort of Cock Robin? We really did find people, grown-up people, who positively believed it; and to the days of our respective deaths we shall remember the shock that the discovery caused us. It seemed to us incredible that any human being could be so foolish when we could show them, at the season of the year, half-a-dozen robins' nests, cup-shaped, with the ruddy-speckled eggs lying in them, possibly even with the red-breasted mother in person seated upon them; when we could show them, too, as many wrens' nests in quite different situations,-nestled against the ivy growing on a tree or an old wall, whereas the robins' would be by preference in a hole or ledge of some hedge-bank-dome-shaped nests utterly unlike any that ever a robin built, and entered by one tiny little hole in the side through which no robin could possibly squeeze himself, filled, likely enough, with many more eggs than a robin was at all likely to lay, much smaller eggs, besides, marked with darker speckles on a much whiter ground, boy, having all these

How could a things most

clearly before his mental eye, be expected to credit any wisdom to people who could believe that Cock Robin and Jenny Wren were man and wife?

Close beside the hay-rick was the shed in which the one cart, sufficing for the agricultural business of our home, was laid up. The butt-linhay Joe called this building, butt being the Devonshire word for cart; and in its roof there often was a dome-shaped wren's nest. The first year the dome was never used for family purposes. Joe, absolutely denying that he had ever so transgressed, asserted that one of us must have put a finger into the hole, and he had repeatedly warned us that if ever one so invaded the sanctity of a wren's nest before the eggs were laid the mother always deserted. We stoutly declared that we had done nothing of the sort, but it is possible that once, in the hope of finding a tiny egg within, we may have been guilty; really it is very hard on a boy that a bird should build a round nest and put it in the roof of a shed so that he is not able

to see into it! However it happened nothing came of the wren's nest that year. We watched long and zealously, but no little, creeping, fluttering, brown bird came to see what we were doing there, nor scolded crossly from the bushes. Since those days we have read that so many wren's nests are found deserted and unfinished that it is the opinion of many naturalists that the wren habitually builds one or two trial nests to get its hand in for the one it means ultimately to finish and inhabit. It is easy to put these theorists into the difficult position of those who have to prove a negative, and we are quite as much inclined to Joe's view, though later experience has taught us that he too was not absolutely exempt from

human error.

383

THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM.

IT is a poor heart that never rejoices, and it may be supposed that he is а singularly mean-spirited Liberal (to use the term, for the present, in its narrower sense, as connoting Lord Rosebery's followers) who cannot squeeze some drops of consolation even from an overwhelming Liberal defeat. It may be impossible indeed to claim the moral victory which a by-election seems invariably to yield to the losing side; yet concealed among the figures there are often found to lie strange portents, and one or another of the usual experiments in elementary mathematics will to a certainty establish the comforting fact that if only a certain small percentage of the voters had voted the other way the result would have been altogether different. The man in the street is of course quite clear upon the subject. There always have been and there always will be two political Parties in the country and no more, Whigs and Tories, Liberals and Conservatives, placed alternately in and out of office by the see-saw of public opinion; and the whirligig of time will, in due course, bring about the Liberal revenge.

No doubt, looking

to the history of the last two or three decades and no more, our friend in the street is almost right. His weak point, and the weak point of the average politician, is that his view is too limited. As a matter of fact, if we take a broad survey of British politics since its modern history began with the accession of George the First, both halves of his statement are untrue. There was one period, for example, in later English history

(1714-1763) during the greater portion of which there was for practical purposes only one Party, the Whigs, and some pulverised fragments of what had been a Tory Party; for that was the penalty paid for the obstinate adherence to a policy which had neither principle, common sense, nor national feeling to recommend it, and which rapidly sank into hopeless ruin in the hands of its supporters. Nor is the great principle of political seesaw invariably true. From 1786, for instance, to 1827 the Tories were all but continuously in power; from 1847 to 1874 there were six Liberal administrations, which, though not literally continuous, immensely outnumbered the intervening periods of Tory rule. There is certainly nothing in the science of politics which would lead us to a belief of the powers of any political Party to rise perpetually, like the Phoenix, in new and glorious majesty from the ashes of its former self.

Nor is there anything in the British character to warrant the idea. If there is one thing in the national character more clear than another it

is the intensely conservative instincts of the average Englishman or Scot; and national character, unless under the stress of such an upheaval as the French Revolution, changes but little in a century. He is entirely, or all but entirely, devoid of the sympathetic, imaginative powers of the Celt beyond the water. He dislikes new ideas and new methods; he is not quick at grasping them, and the time spent upon their consideration he regards as more or less wasted. The mere fact that they are new is itself good

ground for their rejection. Even if he be the most rabid of Radicals, the intense conservatism of his nature is visible in almost every detail of his daily life. Consciously or unconsciously he resents change, whether it be a change in the dinner-hour or in the fashion of his hat, in the shape of a hayfork or the wording of a bill of lading. He is profoundly distrustful of experiments, and above all of the experiments of doctrinaires. Few men are so difficult to convince; once convinced, few hold with a more desperate tenacity to an idea or a principle.

There is, in short, in the English character scarcely anything in sympathy with the spirit of modern Liberalism; and it does not require a very keen imagination, or a very deep knowledge of political history, to realise that the creation of the modern Liberal Party out of such uncompromising materials was no child's play. The bow-window politician is apt to think a Liberal Party as essential a part of the British political organism as the Crown. He forgets the tremendous struggles that were needed before the crust of sluggishness and prejudice could be broken through; the lives willingly sacrificed, the careers ruined, the fortunes flung away, the imprisonments and dragooning, the ostracism and social persecution readily accepted before a Liberal Party in the modern sense could come into existence. He forgets that there have been whole generations of English, and more particularly of Scottish, history in which there has not been perceptible on the part of the people the slightest desire for the political and social changes which are as the breath of life to modern Liberalism, generations in which the natural bias of the two nations towards inaction had free scope. A Whig of Walpole's day would have

a

regarded a modern Liberal as monstrosity, and his doctrines as inspired by the Devil. Even the Radicalism which sprang into somewhat feeble being at the close of the eighteenth century was rather the product of a few men of ideas than of any serious political Party. The Liberal Party indeed owes certainly its strength, to some degree its very existence, to a chapter of accidents. Had it not been that public attention during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. was too fully occupied with a succession of grave national crises to admit of legislation making any serious effort to keep pace with national development, had not the character of the French Revolution driven the Tory Party into an unreasoning opposition to all changemodern Liberalism might never have come into being at all; certainly it would never have attained in Great Britain to one-half its actual influence. In itself, as has been said, there is little in Liberalism which is attractive to the genius of Englishman or Scot; but when at every turn a man who did not chance to belong to one of the privileged classes, and for the matter of that many a one who did, found himself confronted by some stinging injustice or inequality for which he had no means of redress, it was not strange that his natural conservatism of character should be overborne by a new force. On the other hand, when once the abuses were removed which the neglect of years had allowed to accumulate, when the legislative machine had been rescued from its deplorable state of disrepair, above all, when the Tory Party had abandoned its old obstinate attitude of opposition to all reform, there was no reason in the character of Englishman or Scot, or in the political history of either, why his innate conservatism should not again assert itself and his vote be

steadily cast against the Party of Change.

It is difficult to doubt from a careful survey of the facts, that this is precisely what has happened and is still happening. The removal of each abuse snapped a tie which bound a particular class to the Liberal interest, and left it free to follow its natural gravitation to the Conservative Party. Nothing is clearer to the fair-minded political student than that there has been during the last twenty years in particular, but to an appreciable extent ever since the date of the Reform Bill, a steady transference of Liberal votes to the Conservative side. Whole classes, the smaller traders, for example, which once were practically made up of Liberals, are now notoriously the reverse. Entire districts, such as Lancashire which fifty years ago was the very bugbear of the Tory Party, are now steeped in the most stolid Conservatism. If there were any constituencies in the kingdom to which the Liberals might fairly have looked for a continuance, if not a perpetuation of their predominance, it was in the great industrial communities of the North and Midlands. Nowhere was political intelligence so keen, Dissent nowhere more vigorous; nowhere had political education been carried so far; nowhere were deeper debts of gratitude due to the Liberal Party. Yet what is the result? Great cities such as Manchester or Bradford, where in our grandfathers' days to be a Tory at all required some courage, now return fully as many Conservatives as Liberals, and often more; on their exchanges, where a generation ago a Tory merchant had, like Agag, to walk delicately, the trend of opinion is now overwhelmingly Conservative. The mere fact that in 1895 the Liberals were compelled to abandon one hundred and twenty English No. 431.-VOL. LXXII.

seats, and most of them borough constituencies, as hopeless, is in itself a striking example of the revolution in political sentiment which has taken place during the last generation. And what would Cobbett have said had he been told that on a trebly extended electorate the Liberal Party could only secure one hundred and sixteen out of a total of four hundred and sixty-five English seats, and that of the fifty-eight Lancashire seats just nine are Liberal? More startling still are the results revealed by an analysis of the results of successive elections in Liberal strongholds. Taking the aggregate vote in twenty-five constituencies in Great Britain, which twenty years ago would justifiably have been regarded as veritable Liberal preserves, nothing is more curious than to watch the steady increase in the Conservative percentage of the total vote.1 In 1874 it was thirty-five per cent., in 1880 thirty-three, in 1885 forty-two, in 1886 forty-six, in 1892 forty-seven, and finally at the recent election more than half the votes polled were cast for the Unionist candidates. In the dark hours of 1874 every one of these twenty-five seats stood firm for the Liberal cause; to-day, setting aside those held by the Liberal Unionists, nineteen of the forty-six modern seats are in the hands of the Conservatives, some to all appearance permanently so.

1 The following are the constituencies in question Scotland and Wales have rather more than their due proportion, and seats

occupied by Liberal Unionists have been so

far as possible avoided: West Aberdeenshire, Bradford, Bury, Derby, Dudley, Edinburgh, Gateshead, Glamorgan, Halifax, Inverness Burghs, North Lanark, Leicester, Leith Burghs, Middlesbrough, Morpeth, Rochdale, Sheffield, South Shields, Stockton, Sunder

land, Swansea, Tynemouth, Wolverhampton, Wednesbury, Walsall. London has been necessarily avoided from the impossibility of comparing the seats of 1874 with those of 1895 on account of the changes made by the Redistribution Bill, or the increase would have appeared considerably larger.

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