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.