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.

I do not of course mean that the ten-pound householders were great
admirers of intellect or good judges of refinement. We all know that,
for the most part, they were not so