any such result -- to arrest the development by his
conversion to Home Rule. For this movement
compelled many Liberals to seek union with the
Conservatives; and it submerged the rising social-
istic, ultra-democratic sentiment in the Liberal
Party under the volcanic ashes of a fierce racial
and sectarian controversy.

Stratification again was growing very marked
in the years of Gladstone's final ministry, and those
which followed. From 1892, onwards till nearly
the end of the century, it was almost a matter of
course that any person, belonging to the propertied,
"respectable" orders of society, should be a Con-
servative; while the masses of working-class voters,
feeling the power conferred upon them by the ex-
tension of the franchise, were growing aggressively
Radical. Then came the Boer War, and the transfer
of the political conflict to the Imperialist battle-
ground; and then again the division on fiscal
policy and the dispute over Tariff Reform. What-
ever may have been the motives or the policy
inspiring the successive disruptions of English
parties, since the eighteenth-century Whigs fell
to pieces in the war with France, they have
had this effect. The great peril, so constantly
present to the minds of philosophic opponents
of democracy in ancient and modern times, has
been averted; and even under a wide popular
franchise we have not as yet found the nation
divided into two antagonistic and embittered
political hosts, of which one would include all who
own property, and the other would be made up of
those who possess little but their hands -- and their
votes.

-134-