collision between them! I
anticipate no such horrible event. For, between those two parties
stands a third party, infinitely more powerful than both the others put
together, attacked by both, vilified by both, but destined, I trust,
to save both from the fatal effects of their own folly. To that party
I have never ceased, through all the vicissitudes of public affairs, to
look with confidence and with good a hope. I speak of that great party
which zealously and steadily supported the first Reform Bill, and
which will, I have no doubt, support the second Reform Bill with equal
steadiness and equal zeal. That party is the middle class of England,
with the flower of the aristocracy at its head, and the flower of the
working classes bringing up its rear. That great party has taken its
immovable stand between the enemies of all order and the enemies of
all liberty. It will have Reform: it will not have revolution: it will
destroy political abuses: it will not suffer the rights of property to
be assailed: it will preserve, in spite of themselves, those who are
assailing it, from the right and from the left, with contradictory
accusations: it will be a daysman between them: it will lay its hand
upon them both: it will not suffer them to tear each other in pieces.
While that great party continues unbroken, as it now is unbroken, I
shall not relinquish the hope that this great contest may be conducted,
by lawful means, to a happy termination. But, of this I am assured, that
by means, lawful or unlawful, to a termination, happy or unhappy, this
contest must speedily come. All that I know of the history of past
times, all the observations that I have been able to make on the present
state of the country, have convinced me that the time has arrived when
a great concession must be made to the democracy of England; that the
question, whether the change be in itself good or bad, has become a
question of secondary importance; that, good or bad, the thing must
be done; that a law as strong as the laws of attraction and motion has
decreed it.

I well know that history, when we look at it in small portions, may be
so construed as to mean anything, that it may be interpreted in as many
ways as a Delphic oracle. "The French Revolution," says one expositor,
"was the effect of concession." "Not so," cries another: "The French
Revolution was produced by the obstinacy of an arbitrary government."
"If the French nobles," says the first, "had re