Grote lived to decline a peerage; when the ballot was at last ...

Grote lived to decline a peerage; when the ballot was at last conceded in 1872 John Mill had decided that he did not want it and had moved on to proportional representation instead; Leader vanished into an aesthetic Italian exile; Molesworth's features are more familiar at Ottawa than his name at Westminster. The case for Free Trade was taken out of their hands by men who had learnt their economics in the counting-house, their logic on the platform, and their rhetoric in the pulpit.' But they had done inestimable service.

They came down into a world where mediaeval prejudice, Tudor Law, Stuart economics, and Hanoverian patronage still luxuriated in wild confusion, and by the straight and narrow paths they cut we are walking still.

The Gladstonian Liberals have gone where the Peelites followed the Canningites; the Evangelical creed long ago foundered on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, and the great Whig name has not been heard for fifty

years.