SHOOTING NIAGARA 189

porters, led by Robert Lowe, regarded the measure as an uncalled-
for step towards the destruction of property and freedom, a With
our own rash and inconsiderate hands," he declared, "we are
abottt to pluck down on our heads the venerable temple of our
liberty and our glory."1 Entering the lobbies with the reactionary
Tories, the tt Adullamites," as the old reformer Bright called them,
defeated the bill in committee. The government resigned, and
the Conservatives, still in a minority, took office.

But Disraeli, their leader in the Commons, having nursed his
Party for twenty years in the wilderness without enjoying a
majority, had no intention of committing it in the hour of
recovery to the same policy of obstinate resistance to the popular
tide which had ruined it in 1830. The debates had re-awakened the
country to an interest in reform* There were demonstrations
in its favour in Hyde Park that July when, the gates being locked
by the police, the mob tore up the railings of Park Lane.2 The
government, opened the session of 1867 by introducing a reform
measure of its own. Punch depicted the Prime Minister, Lord
Derby, in bonnet and petticoats making off with the infant
bill while its mother, Lord Russell, surveying the empty pram,
cried out, "Hi! help! ple'-ae-ce-I She's a takin5 away me cheild."

The new bill went farther than that of the Liberals. In the
counties the basis proposed was household suffrage qualified
by personal rating and two years' residence. In adopting what
seemed to many a Liberal policy Disraeli was honouring an ideal
which he had proclaimed at the outset of his career. For it had
always been his contention that the first Reform bill had
impaired the English principle of representation. He had
objected to it not, as many Tories had done, because it increased
the electorate but because it made the representation of opinion
less effective.8 The object of a parliamentary system, he held,

1 Parliamentary Debates, CLXXXII, 2118. A still stronger expression of the case
against unnecessary concessions was made by Bulwer Lytton in a speech of 1859. "Do
not give to-day what you regret to-morrow that you cannot restore. Democracy is
like the grave—it perpetually cries, * Give! give!' and like the grave it never returns
what it has once taken. But you live under a constitutional monarehy which has ill
the vigour of health, all the energy of movement. Do not surrender to democrtcy
that which is not yet ripe for the grave."

* Demonstrations occurred in other parts of the country, especially at Manchester,
Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow. Those in Hyde^Park had one interesting
consequence in leading to the permanent policing of the west-end parks.

* "In a hasty and factious effort to get rid of representation without election, it
will he as well if eventually we do not discover that we have only obtained election
without representation.*—Disraeli, Pfaftaffoa tf Constitution (*?#)» Cfafttr
X7I.