Derby, Lord Russell, Lord Palmerston, retained great power.  Lord Palmerston to the last retained great prohibitive power.  Though in some ways always young, he had not a particle of sympathy with the younger generation; he brought forward no young men; he obstructed all that young men wished.  In consequence, at his death a new generation all at once started into life; the pre-’32 all at once died out.  Most of the new politicians were men who might well have been Lord Palmerston’s grandchildren.  He came into Parliament in 1806, they entered it after 1856.  Such an enormous change in the age of the workers necessarily caused a great change in the kind of work attempted and the way in which it was done.  What we call the “spirit” of politics is more surely changed by a change of generation in the men than by any other change whatever.  Even if there had been no Reform Act, this single cause would have effected grave alterations.

The mere settlement of the Reform question made a great change too.  If it could have been settled by any other change, or even without any change, the instant effect of the settlement would still have been immense.  New questions would have appeared at once.  A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were waiting in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the withdrawal of the old ones brought in light and air.  These new questions of themselves would have made a new atmosphere, new parties, new debates.

Of course I am not arguing that so important an innovation as the Reform Act of 1867 will not have very great effects.  It must, in all likelihood, have many great ones.  I am only saying that as yet we do not know what those effects are; that the great evident change since 1865 is certainly not strictly due to it; probably is not even in a principal measure due to it; that we have still to conjecture what it will cause and what it will not cause.

The principal question arises most naturally from a main doctrine of these essays.  I have said that Cabinet government is possible in England because England was a deferential country.  I meant that the nominal constituency was not the real constituency; that the mass of the “ten-pound” house-holders did not really form their own opinions, and did not exact of their representatives an obedience to those opinions; that they were in fact guided in their judgment by the better educated classes; that they preferred representatives from those classes, and gave those representatives much licence.  If a hundred small shopkeepers had by miracle been added to any of the ’32 Parliaments, they would have felt outcasts there.  Nothing could be more unlike those Parliaments than the average mass of the constituency from which they were chosen.