venture to submit on the present occasion.”  This language is very suitable to the greater part of the House of Commons.  Most men of business love a sort of twilight.  They have lived all their lives in an atmosphere of probabilities and of doubt, where nothing is very clear, where there are some chances for many events, where there is much to be said for several courses, where nevertheless one course must be determinedly chosen and fixedly adhered to.  They like to hear arguments suited to this intellectual haze.  So far from caution or hesitation in the statement of the argument striking them as an indication of imbecility, it seems to them a sign of practicality.  They got rich themselves by transactions of which they could not have stated the argumentative ground—­and all they ask for is a distinct though moderate conclusion, that they can repeat when asked; something which they feel not to be abstract argument, but abstract argument diluted and dissolved in real life.  “There seem to me,” an impatient young man once said, “to be no stay in Peel’s arguments.”  And that was why Sir Robert Peel was the best leader of the Commons in our time; we like to have the rigidity taken out of an argument, and the substance left.  Nor indeed, under our system of government, are the leaders themselves of the House of Commons, for the most part, eager to carry party conclusions too far.  They are in contact with reality.  An Opposition, on coming into power, is often like a speculative merchant whose bills become due.  Ministers have to make good their promises, and they find a difficulty in so doing.  They have said the state of things is so and so, and if you give us the power we will do thus and thus.  But when they come to handle the official documents, to converse with the permanent under-secretary—­ familiar with disagreeable facts, and though in manner most respectful, yet most imperturbable in opinion—­very soon doubts intervene.  Of course, something must be done; the speculative merchant cannot forget his bills; the late Opposition cannot, in office, forget those sentences which terrible admirers in the country still quote.  But just as the merchant asks his debtor, “Could you not take a bill at four months?” so the new Minister says to the permanent under-secretary, “Could you not suggest a middle course?  I am of course not bound by mere sentences used in debate; I have never been accused of letting a false ambition of consistency warp my conduct; but,” etc., etc.  And the end always is that a middle course is devised which looks as much as possible like what was suggested in opposition, but which is as much as possible what patent facts—­facts which seem to live in the office, so teasing and unceasing are they—­prove ought to be done.  Of all modes of enforcing moderation on a party, the best is to contrive that the members of that party shall be intrinsically moderate, careful, and almost shrinking men; and the next best to contrive that the leaders of the party, who have protested most in its behalf, shall be placed in the closest contact with the actual world.  Our English system contains both contrivances; it makes party government permanent and possible in the sole way in which it can be so, by making it mild.