ench Revolution. They stood
now for individual liberty, laying especial stress on freedom of
trade, freedom of contract, and freedom of competition. They had set
themselves to break down the rule of the landowner and the Church, to
shake off the fetters of Protection, and to establish equality before
the law. Their acceptance of egalitarian principles led them to adopt
democratic ideals, to advocate extension of the suffrage, and the
emancipation of the working classes. Such principles, though not
revolutionary, are to some extent disruptive in their tendency; and
their adoption by the Liberals had forced the Tory party to range
themselves in defense of the existing order of things. They professed
to stand for the Crown, the Church, and the Constitution. They were
compelled by the irresistible trend of events to accept democratic
principles and to carry out democratic reforms. They preferred, in
fact, to carry out such reforms themselves, in order that the
safeguards which they considered necessary might be respected.
Democratic principles having been adopted, both parties made it their
object to redress grievances; but the Conservatives showed a natural
predisposition to redress those grievances which arose from excessive
freedom of competition, the Liberals were the more anxious to redress
those which were the result of hereditary or customary privilege. The
harmony of the State consists in the equilibrium between the two
opposing forces of liberty and order. The Liberals laid more stress
upon liberty, the Conservatives attached more importance to order and
established authority."[214]

[Footnote 214: S. Leathes, in Cambridge Modern
History, XII., 30-31.]

*157. The First Gladstone Ministry.*--Upon the death of Palmerston in
1865 Lord John Russell became premier a second time, but in the course
of the following year a franchise reform bill brought forward by the
Government was defeated in the Commons, through the instrumentality
chiefly of a group of old Liberals (the "Adullamites") who (p. 150)
opposed modification of the electoral system, and by curious
circumstance it fell to the purely Conservative Derby-Disraeli
ministry of 1866-1868 not only to carry the first electoral reform
since 1832 but to impart to that reform a degree of thoroughness upon
which none save the most advanced radicals had cared to insist. The
results of the doubling of the electorate were manife