which it was founded.”  He inserted an intimation of that doctrine in the Queen’s speech; and endeavored to give effect to it by bringing in a bill to lower the franchise, having, it seems, persuaded himself that a five-pound franchise would create a more Conservative class of voters.[273] He had scarcely introduced it when the fall of his ministry led to its abandonment; but, though it was coldly received by the House of Commons, the idea was taken up by the other political parties, who can hardly be acquitted of having used the question merely as an instrument of party warfare, trying, with an unstatesmanlike indifference to the danger of re-awakening the old frenzy on the subject, to rouse the nation to take an interest in it; but trying in vain.  The nation was no longer in the same temper as it had displayed twenty years before.  The Reform Bill of 1832 had been demanded and carried with a frantic vehemence of enthusiasm such as could only have been excited by real defects and grievances.  But those grievances had been removed and redressed.  And the bulk of the people could take no interest in schemes whose sole end seemed to be either to satisfy the theories of some political doctrinaires or to embarrass an adversary; till at last, as Reform Bill after Reform Bill was framed, brought in, and defeated, or dropped, it became plain, “as the Prince Consort noted in a private memorandum at the end of 1859, that what the country wanted, in fact, was not reform, but a bill to stop the question of Reform."[274] And, at last, the prevalence of this feeling Lord John Russell could not conceal even from himself, but confessed to Lord Palmerston, then Prime-minister, who had always silently discouraged the movement, that “the apathy of the country was undeniable; nor was it a transient humor.  It seemed rather a confirmed habit of mind.  Four Reform Bills had been introduced of late years by four different governments, and for not one of them had there been the least enthusiasm.  The conclusion to which he had come was, that the advisers of the crown of all parties having offered to the country various measures of reform, and the country having shown itself indifferent to them all, the best course which could now be taken was to wait till the country should show a manifest desire for an amendment of the representation."[275]

There was, however, in these years one subject in which the country did take a real interest; that was the development and extension of the principles of free-trade.  On that the national view had become so decided that in 1848 the Parliament even abolished the navigation laws, which had subsisted so long, the first act on the subject dating from the reign of Richard II., that the adherence to the principle contained in them of confining both the export and the import trade of the kingdom, with but few exceptions, to British shipping, seemed almost an essential article of the constitution.  It was the dearer, too, to the national prejudices, from the sense universally