With this outline I pass to her present condition and outlook.  The dictatorial and selfish policy has been forced to give way somewhat in regard to the colonies.  The spirit of the age and the strength of the colonies forbid its exercise; they cannot be held by the old policy.  Australia boldly adopts a protective tariff, and her parliament is only nominally controlled by the crown.  Canada exacts duties on English goods, and England cannot help herself.  Even with these concessions, can England keep her great colonies?  They are still loyal in word.  They still affect English manners and English speech, and draw their intellectual supplies from England.  On the prospect of a war with Russia they nearly all offered volunteers.  But everybody knows that allegiance is on the condition of local autonomy.  If united Canada asks to go, she will go.  So with Australia.  It may be safely predicted that England will never fight again to hold the sovereignty of her new-world possessions against their present occupants.  And, in the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union—­the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and actual sovereign.  Sovereign power over America in the parliament Franklin never would admit.  His idea was that all the inhabitants of the empire must be citizens, not some of them subjects ruled by the home citizens.  The two great political parties of England are really formed on lines constructed after the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832.  The Tories had been long in power.  They had made many changes and popular concessions, but they resisted parliamentary reform.  The great Whig lords, who had tried to govern England without the people and in opposition to the crown in the days of George iii., had learned to seek popular support.  The Reform Bill, which was ultimately forced through by popular pressure and threat of civil war, abolished the rotten boroughs, gave representation to the large manufacturing towns and increased representation to the counties, and the suffrage to all men who had ’paid ten pounds a year rent in boroughs, or in the counties owned land worth ten pounds a year or paid fifty pounds rent.  The immediate result of this was to put power into the hands of the middle classes and to give the lower classes high hopes, so that, in 1839, the Chartist movement began, one demand of which was universal suffrage.  The old party names of Whig and Tory had been dropped and the two parties had assumed their present appellations of Conservatives and Liberals.  Both parties had, however, learned that there was no rest for any ruling party except a popular basis, and the Conservative party had the good sense to strengthen itself in 1867 by carrying through Mr. Disraeli’s bill, which gave the franchise in boroughs to all householders paying rates, and in counties to all occupiers of property rated at fifteen pounds a year.  This broadening of the suffrage places the power irrevocably in the hands of the people, against whose judgment neither crown nor ministry can venture on any important step.