ABSTRACT
The Government would be mad which seriously attempted to face an angry people on the strength of seven thousand police staves. Local self-government, representation of the people, civil liberty, was all the cry, until at last the tone of English public life became saturated with ideas of rule by consent, and not by force. John Bright’s vociferous hatred of the aristocratic-landed interest kept him out of governmental office until 1868, when he was fifty-seven and had been in Parliament for twenty-five years. Even apart from the Conservative “leap in the dark” into parliamentary reform the year 1867 was a sufficiently disturbed one. The admission of professing Jews to Parliament violated an important body of belief but as no one contemplated a House containing more than a tiny minority of professing Jews it was easy enough to shelve the question of principle.
