And yet the party, as a party, had swallowed them both.

To the first and lesser evil, a compact little body of staunch Commoners had stood forth in opposition,--but nothing had come of it to those true Britons beyond a feeling of living in the cold shade of exclusion.
When the greater evil arrived, that of Household Suffrage,--a measure which twenty years since would hardly have been advocated by the advanced Liberals of the day,--the Conservatives had learned to acknowledge the folly of clinging to their own convictions, and had swallowed the dose without serious disruption of their ranks.

Every man,--with but an exception or two,--took the measure up, some with faces so singularly distorted as to create true pity, some with an assumption of indifference, some with affected glee.

But in the double process the party had become used to this mode of carrying on the public service.

As poor old England must go to the dogs, as the doom had been pronounced against the country that it should be ruled by the folly of the many foolish, and not by the wisdom of the few wise, why should the few wise remain out in the cold,--seeing, as they did, that by so doing no good would be done to the country?
Dissensions among their foes did, when properly used, give them power,--but such power they could only use by carrying measures which they themselves believed to be ruinous.