ven they knew at the time the full
importance of the constitutional principle which they had thus
established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really
constitutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem
to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant
of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people
according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of
statesmanship. When the passing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest
event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very
justly, regarded this assertion of the right of a representative
Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the
greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The
natural feeling therefore was to assume that the men who had done these
great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the
realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire
and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our
constitutional and our social system.

The time was one especially favorable for such hopes and for such
achievements. A new era had opened on the civilized world. New ideas
were coming up regarding the value and the validity of many of our
constitutional and social arrangements which had formerly been
considered as inspired and sanctified forever by that mysterious
influence, the wisdom of our ancestors. If education had not yet made
much way among the masses of the people, at least the belief in popular
education was becoming a quickening force in the minds of all
intelligent men. Then, as ever since, the agitation for each great new
reform began outside the walls of Parliament, and had to take an
organized shape before it became a question for the House of Commons.
The first great work to which the reformed Parliament applied itself,
after the conditions of Lord Grey's Act had been allowed to take effect
in remoulding the constituencies, was the abolition of negro slavery in
the colonies of Great Britain. Domestic slavery and the slave trade
had already been abolished, but in the minds of a great number of
well-meaning, well-informed, and by no means hard-hearted men slavery
in our colonies was a very different sort of institution from slavery
in our own islands, or from the actual trade in slaves. The ordinary
Englishman, when he troubled himself to consider such questions