"It is impossible to maintain that these attributes [caution and progress] have been constant in the two great English parties. The Conservatives or Tories have often been progressive; the Liberals or Whigs stationary or retrogressive. Macaulay, in his famous reply to Lord Mahon, maintained that the Whigs had always kept in advance of the Tories, even though the whole nation might have moved onwards, just as the forelegs of the stag are always leading.But in fact both parties have passed and repassed one another, and have frequently exchanged places and influence; each by turn has had its phases of protection and free trade, imperialism and insularity, democracy and oligarchy, socialism and individualism. During the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, and down to the accession to power of William Pitt, the Tories, with some justice, boasted that they were the representatives of popular rights and national interests as against the aristocratic Whig cliques; and until the outbreak of the great war with France, it was the Whigs who were usually the party of foreign adventure and expansion, while the Tories had rather a stronger leaning towards peace and retrenchment and economic progress. Political reform has never been a Liberal monopoly; and social reform has found its champions at least as often in the Conservative ranks as in those of their rivals. On the other hand, the Conservatives, until the Beaconsfield Ministry of 1874, were not specially identified with the maintenance of the Empire; and in the 'fifties and sixties, under Lord Derby and Disraeli himself, they were less ardent vindicators of English pretensions abroad than the dominant section of the Liberals under Palmerston.Thus it is a difficult, perhaps even an impossible, task to draw a dividing line from age to age between the two parties, on the basis of doctrine. But the fact is that Englishmen, in their public as in their private life, have no great regard for abstract generalisations. They are careless about measures and much more particular about men. Fidelity to persons, rather than to principles, is the spirit of our party life."