Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/280

 266 History of the Radical Party in Parliament. [1834- The Liberals, then, were again called to office, and there was some speculation as to the conditions and principles under which the distribution of places would be made. The ques- tion on which the contest had been based was distinctly Radical. It had in the previous session split up the Whig Ministry, and led to the secession of Ripon, Stanley, and Graham, and there were Whigs yet left in the party to whom it was far from acceptable. But it was necessary that some decided step should be taken in the first place, to prove that the opposition leaders were really more Liberal than the Ministry ; and in the second place, to secure the Irish and the extreme Radical support. There was good ground for claim- ing that those whose ideas and whose votes had assisted in the victory should share in the spoils, or rather should be allowed to assist in carrying into effect the policy to which they were most sincerely devoted. The Radicals, besides being the strongest in popular estimation, were numerically nearly one-half of the entire Liberal party. We have seen that estimates as to the exact numbers of the different sec- tions varied spmewhat widely, but it is fair to reckon that only Radicals would vote for the ballot,* and when, in this first session of the new Parliament, on the 2nd of June, Grote brought forward his resolution for that object, he obtained 144 votes, whilst the total number of votes in the final divi- sion which drove out the Conservative Government was 322. It is necessary once more to notice that the Radicals were not divided by any sharp line of demarcation from the other Liberals. They were the most advanced and the most earnest section of the party, the result of the growth of opinion in the country and in Parliament, and not a suddenly created caste with views and feelings separated from those of the rest of the nation. They had more faith in the people, and a stronger desire to extend the popular power, than the Whigs showed in their actions, but not more than they professed when they question, may be gathered from the way in which their clerical champion Sidney Smith speaks of secret voting and its advocates. See article " The Ballot," in his collected works, single volume edition, pp, 769, et seq*
 * How strongly the Whigs looked upon the ballot as a distinctively Radical