THE "RISING HOPE" DAYS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 178, 29 July 1932, Page 6

THE "RISING HOPE" DAYS.

A century ago to-day the first Reform Act received the royal assent, and it may be difficult for even the most determined of modern Conservatives to realise the fear and horror with which his forbears viewed that very limited victory of democracy («u's the "Manchester Guardian"). t Just before the passage of the bill a letter appeared in a London newspaper from an Oxford undergraduate, who, having watched a demonstration at Warwick, wrote: "Ifthe nobility, gentry and clergy are to be alarmed, overawed or' smothered by the expression of popular opinion such as this, if no great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly rushing or heedle&ily sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to the slaughter or a fool to tho correction of the stocks, what is it but ,a symptom as infallible as it is appalling that •the day of our greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory?" This grandiloquent jeremiad—penned on the eve of the Victorian era—was signed "W. E. Gladstone." And it belongs, of course, to a. period slightly earlier than the one in which it was still possible to describe the future G.O.M. of Liberalism as "the rising hope o£ the stern, unbending Tories."