sometimes with one party, sometimes with another.
They engender "opportunism," as it has been called, in
the leaders of a party, lassitude and bewilderment in their
followers. A period of confusion ensues, accompanied
by much moral perplexity and political tergiversation,
and this lasts until parties are once more divided
according to natural lines of cleavage.

Peel entered public life just before the beginning of
one of these periods of confusion. The Tories were
nominally the party of order and the Whigs the party
of progress; though what really divided them was not
this fundamental distinction of human nature and human
society, but the policy and conduct of the war. The
Tories had conducted the war with vigour, determina-
tion, and undaunted endurance. Inter arma silent leges.
Organic reform is incompatible with a struggle for
national existence, and therefore so long as the war lasted
it was natural that the Tory party should maintain its
ascendency. But no sooner was the war over than the
new forces engendered by the mechanical inventions
and the consequent commercial expansion of the last
century began to exert their influence. The Tory party
as then constituted was incapable of adapting itself to
the new conditions of national existence. It had so
long been accustomed to present a front of steel to all
proposals of change that it could not readily be brought
to acknowledge that there are temperatures at which
even steel may be fused. How then was the party of
resistance to be reconciled to necessary and inevitable
change? Its position in the House of Lords was im-
pregnable to assault, and until the Reform Bill was
passed in 1832 it was dominant in the House of Com-

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