They kept Ireland quiet, but their pacts with O'Connell seemed to English ...

They kept Ireland quiet, but their pacts with O'Connell seemed to English opinion a disgraceful subservience to a rebel. They accepted Penny Postage, but on a falling revenue it sent their finance to pieces.

Palmerston, marching steadily and buoyantly on a queue of his own, brightened their last days with a diplomatic triumph over France and a naval victory over

Mehemet Ali, of which,

perhaps, in the long run, the most that can be said is that it gave England something to think of beside the misery of 1840. All through the thirties we are aware of a growing disaffection, of which Carlyle and Dickens are mouthpieces, with the delays and irrelevancies ' of parliamentary

government, which, as the years went on,

seemed to be degenerating more and more into an unseemly scuffle between Ins and Outs. The political satire of Dickens is tedious and ignorant.

But it registers, what Past and Present conveys more passionately, the disillusionment which followed on the hopes of 1830. Socially, the first reformed Parliaments were hardly distinguishable from their predecessors.

The days of extravagant expenditure, when the poll

was open for three weeks and a

candidate might spend, as the virtuous and religious Acland did in Devon, 480,000 in four contests, were over and done with.

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