Page:Radicalism, what is it?.djvu/10

6 I will make a few remarks on each of these statements and verify them by some simple facts.

 Its want of cohesiveness.

A glance at the doctrines of Radicalism will manifest their cardinal principle—destructiveness. So long as some common object for attack can be found, so long a union between the various shades and sections of Radicalism will exist. The moment their energies are summoned to a higher office, inherent divisions succeed, and a boasted political party with an overwhelming majority resolves itself into discordant and angry factions. Look at the picture of the Great Liberal party with its majority of 70 failing to execute its own task of Reform, and yielding office for two years to the minority. Adullamites, Whigs, Liberals and advanced Radicals, disunited, wrangling, and more bitterly divided from each other than from their common foe.

Nor is there any question except the present one of the Irish Church, so artfully selected for the purpose, which could or would rally the entire party. This once disposed of, the same anarchy must inevitably follow, and with the same results.

 Its unfairness.

Misrepresentation is the cardinal vice of the body generally from the unscrupulous pot house politician whose stock in trade consists of denunciations of a 'bloated aristocracy' to men of cultivated minds like Mr. Gladstone who with his boasted majority of