The Whig could be, and often was, extraordinarily covetous. He could be, and often was, more solicitous concerning his party than his country, or, rather, he was too much accustomed to think of the prosperity of his party as identical with that of his country. But he was, generally speaking, loyal to his ideas and to the institutions which stood for his ideas, and he understood, better than his opponents, what it meant to play for a side. Whigs quarrelled fiercely among themselves after the enemy was beaten; before a still formidable foe they possessed a rare instinct of discipline. So long as the nineteenth-century Liberal Party was mainly Whiggish it was mainly victorious; and it was no merely reactionary inspiration which made Whiggism regard Radicalism as on the whole a deadlier enemy than Toryism; the Radical was not so much a rebel against the social scheme as against the Party Whip. Whiggism would probably have conquered Radicalism and continued to give its own impress to the Party but for the Home Rule split. But that convulsion left so few great Whig families on the Liberal side that the influence of those who remained was chiefly personal. So long as men like Earl Spencer lived they were able to preserve to some extent the character of the Party. But they left no successors. Nothing is more remarkable than the dying out of political talent among the landed classes during the last twenty years; and it is perhaps not altogether fanciful to connect it with the decline of the Whigs, who, in their palmy days, not only maintained themselves in full efficiency, but acted as a sort of pace-maker for their opponents. The Whig nobility was never numerically in a majority, but it commanded the greater part of aristocratic talent, and it created a certain spirit of emulation among young Tories. But when the Whigs went over to the Tory Party this stimulus was wanting. There was really no need for any strenuous contest of wits in the Upper House; still less was there any necessity for Party discipline. No doubt henceforward existed as to the result of a party division, and though it might be desirable to justify by argument the course decided by numbers, no case is likely to be either attacked or defended with full vigour and acuteness when the speaker knows that no single vote will be affected by his eloquence or his logic.