it is easy, as to almost every question, to separate the sheep from
the goats. With but few exceptions one can tell where to look for the
supporters and where for the opponents of one measure or of another.
Meetings are called in this or in that public hall to assist or to
combat the Minister of the day, and men know what they are about. But
now it was not so. It was understood that Mr. Daubeny, the accredited
leader of the Conservatives, was about to bring in the bill, but
no one as yet knew who would support the bill. His own party, to a
man,--without a single exception,--were certainly opposed to the
measure in their minds. It must be so. It could not but be certain
that they should hate it. Each individual sitting on the Conservative
side in either House did most certainly within his own bosom cry
Ichabod when the fatal news reached his ears. But such private
opinions and inward wailings need not, and probably would not, guide
the body. Ichabod had been cried before, though probably never with
such intensity of feeling. Disestablishment might be worse than Free
Trade or Household Suffrage, but was not more absolutely opposed to
Conservative convictions than had been those great measures. And yet
the party, as a party, had swallowed them both. To the first and
lesser evil, a compact little body of staunch Commoners had stood
forth in opposition,--but nothing had come of it to those true
Britons beyond a feeling of living in the cold shade of exclusion.
When the greater evil arrived, that of Household Suffrage,--a measure
which twenty years since would hardly have been advocated by the
advanced Liberals of the day,--the Conservatives had learned to
acknowledge the folly of clinging to their own convictions, and had
swallowed the dose without serious disruption of their ranks. Every
man,--with but an exception or two,--took the measure up, some with
faces so singularly distorted as to create true pity, some with an
assumption of indifference, some with affected glee. But in the