THE THREE KINGDOMS.

A FULL report of political progress since our last
Narrative, ample as if contained in a blue-backed
folio, could say no more than that we have advanced
a month nearer to the General Election. That is
the goal to which everything has tended. Nothing
has been acted or said that has not had direct reference
to the hustings, the Tapers and Tadpoles have
done their best, and several good cries have gone to
the country.

Nevertheless nothing is in danger, except the
seats of a few honourable gentlemen. What Mr.
Disraeli calls, with great love and unction, in his
addresses to the farmers of Bucks, our Protestant
Crown, might really have seemed to be, from the
loudness of the shouts raised to its rescue, in some
little peril. But closer inquiry shows there is
nothing alarming. For example, the Colonial Minister
and others, with a shrewd electoral look out
at Exeter Hall, made speeches upon the Frome
Vicarage case prophetic of direful consequences to
protestant bishops who should institute to protestant
livings men of more than doubtful protestant faith;
but afterwards came in Mr. Gladstone, and, with as
shrewd regard to his own electors at Oxford, saved the
bishop more particularly in question by the odd
expedient of insisting on his immediate impeachment;
whereupon the protestant fire of the Commons'
house which had just flared up to inconvenient
warmth, fanned by a majority of votes as well as
speeches, was left to burn itself out, and poor Mr.
Horsman, not feeling himself equal to an impeachment,
took nothing at all by the success of his more
moderate motion, and the Frome Vicarage case came
to nothing. Just so it has been with Maynooth.
After a series of speeches that left not unbespattered
a single spot of the scarlet dress of her
who sitteth on the seven hills, Mr. Spooner quietly
took up his hat and wished the old lady good
evening, not having the heart to subject her to further
inconvenience. What remains to be done the electors
are expected to do. In like manner with Education.
When it was unexpectedly announced the other day
that the education question between Church and State,
so long in agitation, had been settled by unqualified
surrender to the Church of everything in dispute, it was
feared that some immediate and overpowering necessity
must exist for so sacrificing the interests of the
laity, till Lord Derby's explanation that the change was
not to take effect till the new parliament should have
had an opportunity of voting on it, reduced the
momentous announcement to a mere election manoeuvre.
And, whatever sensible people may think of the
propriety of popish priests carrying their images and
frippery through the streets of protestant cities, who
gives any higher motive than a hustings one to the
Proclamation of the other day against them?

Whether the hustings has been as judiciously
appealed to in Lord Malmesbury's blundering assent
to a Treaty with M. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, by
which not only Frenchmen of liberal opinions would
no longer have been safe in England, but Englishmen
politically suspected would no longer have been safe
in France, from which treaty he only at last escaped
by flatly turning tail on his own proposal;—whether
the electors have been propitiated equally by Lord
Derby's announced determination to let affairs take
their own way at the Cape;—whether the Militia
Bill will be found, without any kind of drawback, an
attractive novelty commanding popular gratitude;—
whether the money clauses and other clauses in the
New Zealand Government Bill will be as agreeable to
everybody, here and there, as to the late New Zealand
Company;—and finally, whether the amendment by
the Lords, nullifying in effect the Corrupt Voters
Punishment Bill, will be as pleasant to the electors
of Birmingham and the West Riding as to those of
Norwich and Harwich:—all this is open to doubt.

On the other hand it admits of no doubt whatever
that the case of Mr. Mather has not been managed in
a way that is likely to be well received at any polling
place in the country, be its colours blue or yellow,
orange or green. Generally, it may be premised, we
have not a praiseworthy style of managing such
matters. We carry into them too much of mere
shopkeeping. We protect the honour of our subjects
abroad too much after the fashion that we use to
protect the honour of our wives at home. We
enforce our civis Romanus sum by making foreign
governments pay, and it is at times an awkward
precedent. An English gentleman was bastinadoed at
Scutari, and we made the Turk salve his battered
soles with money. M. Pacifico watched the case
with interest, saw a means of turning it to account in
a little matter of his own, and managed in the end
to turn the laugh also hugely against us. But Mr.
Mather's case threatens consequences a thousand
times worse than Don Pacifico's. In the first place,
the position in respect of Italian affairs which we
hold to Austria, is infinitely more delicate than any
in which we could possibly have stood to poor little
insignificant Greece. To have Austrian officers
sabring an Englishman in the most polished capital
of Tuscany, is on all hands confessed to be no small
matter, in whatever light the question of redress is
viewed. Lord Malmesbury consenting to view it
only in one light, as a matter of pecuniary compensation,
it became in the next place obvious that the
efficiency of the reparation, the satisfaction to the
national honour, would depend wholly on the more
or the less. This being admittedly so when the
damage is to property, how much more should it be
held so when personal outrage is in question. The
amount demanded is in truth everything, if it
be once determined that the demand should take
that shape at all. It really would have been a
confession of wrong, and a redress of it, to pay
five thousand pounds, when to offer two hundred
was neither more nor less than an insult. But