to act together for the salvation of their imperilled country: he finds it hopeless, and is forced to form a government first of one party, then of the other. The malignity of faction bursts forth with the utmost fury, and with perfect recklessness of the national interest and honor. A leading Whig is indicted for murder, without a shadow of foundation for the charge, by the animosity of the opposite party. The Privy Council, the old council of the realm, and still the only one known to the law, is superseded by the Cabinet Council, an unconstitutional organ of party. In the following reign the Tory leader Bolingbroke, a sceptic, and a writer against Christianity, overthrows a great Whig Government by appealing to the persecuting fanaticism of the Tory clergy, and sacrifices not only the interest and glory but the good faith and honor of the nation to party objects, in the disgraceful Treaty of Utrecht. On the next revolution of fortune, at the death of Anne, the Whigs in their turn proscribe the Tories. The Tories conspire against the country and twice involve it in civil war. Walpole, out of office, harasses the government, whose principles he professes: in office, he is himself harassed, thwarted in his best measures, and at last driven into a criminal war with Spain, by an opposition heterogeneous in its principles, and which, notwithstanding the torrent of its patriotic eloquence, has no object in view but to oust the minister and clamber into his place. It is a fact of melancholy significance that Chatham, so pure and patriotic by nature, is found deeply implicated in the worst of these transactions. Meantime, the councils of the nation resound with mutual slander, and a party press, the organ of the two factions, fills all hearts with malignity and falsehood.

It is singular that writers on the British Constitution-not only formal writers like Blackstone, but those who try to pierce to the real facts-should have failed to appreciate the cardinal fact that government in England is a government of party. The constitution is the organ through which the dominant

party rules: and so it has been and is under all elective governments. Everywhere you find two parties more or less defined, the struggle between which for the offices of state makes up the political history of the country. Everywhere you have a party morality and a party allegiance conflicting with the claims of humanity and the nation. In England the set of established rules for the party game has superseded the constitutional law as expounded by Blackstone. Party government is implied in the very shape and arrangement of the House of Commons, where the party in power sits on the Speaker's right hand, the party in opposition on his left. In a constitution framed for the Dominion of Canada, the system received a formal recognition, provision being made that the members of the new senate, for the first term, should be chosen fairly from both parties. But whether formally recognized or not, party government is the all-important fact. What is the government of England at present? Not King, Lords, and Commons, nor any of them, but the Liberal party. What is the government of the United States? Not the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, but the Republican party. What is the real legislature of the United States? The Republican caucus. What is the political history of the United States? A long struggle between two parties, culminating in a civil war.

Burke, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,has a defence, or rather an encomium, of party.

"Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards

those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore every honorable connection will avow it is their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution with all the power and authority of the state. As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty to contend for these situations. Without a proscription of others, they are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things; and by no means, for private considerations, to accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included; nor to suffer themselves to be led, or to be controlled, or to be over-balanced, in office or in council, by those who contradict the very fundamental principles on which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must stand. Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and honorable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless imposters who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude."

Such are the praises of party, sung by a great political philosopher, who, at the most important juncture of his own political life, signally broke with party, and died idolized by the opposite party, detested by his own, and vainly struggling to vindicate his loyalty as a partisan by appealing from party as it was to party as it had been.

Burke's theory obviously supposes the continued existence of some difference of principle sufficient to create a fundamental division among honest men, and to reconcile with morality allegiance to a party and submission of the individual conscience to the party councils. As it happens, such a difference of opinion has generally existed between the Tories and Liberals in England down to the present

time, and thus party struggles there, and the characters of party men, have preserved some measure of morality and dignity. But when the fundamental principles of government are settled, how can party fail to degenerate into a selfish and immoral struggle for power? Party managers will, of course, strain their ingenuity to devise party issues, to invest them with factitious importance, and to inflame the mind of the nation about them; but power and pelf will be the real objects of the conflict.

ness.

Even if party were what Burke supposes it to be, it would often exclude the best administrators from the public service; for the best administrators are often men with little turn for speculative politics, and are as likely to be found on one side as on the other. The greatest men are likely to be excluded from politics altogether; because great men will not submit to be the organs of narrow judgments and the instruments of mercenary aims. "The madness of the many for the gain of the few" is a definition of party not only pointed but true: and even when the ambition of the few is generous, for the many party conflicts are little better than madParty consecrates prejudice, applauds rancor, stigmatizes largeness of view, candor, truthfulness, as derelictions of the party faith. It divides the members of a community whose interest is the same, and who, if they were free to form their opinions, would probbably tend to agreement, into two hostile camps carrying on a struggle, which if it has none of the bloodshed, has a good many of the moral evils, of civil war. It sets a premium on the eloquence of malignity, and in the political history of England has raised men who had scarcely any other qualification to places in which they have done great injury not only to the interests but to the honor of their country.

In England the organization of party has hitherto been somewhat less complete than in some other countries under

popular government. Till lately, the elective principle itself has prevailed there, as has been already stated, only

in a very restricted form, and other connections have a good deal traversed the lines of party, and interfered with its ascendancy. Parliamentary elections come at long intervals, and, from the frequent exercise of the prerogative of dissolution, are uncertain in their recurrence; and municipal elections in England being comparatively devoid of interest, there is scarcely enough to keep a regular party organization on foot. The English system of election also, which is unrestricted with regard to the candidate's place of residence, renders it more difficult for local managers to keep nominations in their hands. But when party organization is complete, the elector, compelled to vote at the dictation of the managers, may, like the constitutional king, fancy that he exercises political power, and go through the forms and gestures of sovereignty; but, like the constitutional king, he is in reality a puppet. With electoral liberty, general freedom of opinion and independence of political and social character are in danger of being lost. It is not in any open preaching of imperialist doctrines, so much as in the encroachments of party despotism on the liberty of voting, that we should look for the signs of the decay of liberty in a free state.

Corruption, like faction, beset elective government in England from the first. Before we are half through the reign of William the Deliverer, on the morrow of the Glorious Revolution, we find government systematically bribing members of the House of Commons. The name of Walpole is infamous, perhaps more infamous than it deserves, in the annals of corruption. Not only the secret service-money and the vast amount of sinecure patronage, political and ecclesiastical, with peerages and other honors then in the hands of government, but the public service and even the public loans were prostituted to the purposes of bribery, and administrative abuses were thus engendered under a free government little less flagrant than those which had disgraced the tyranny of Charles II. In England they have now

pretty well worked off the grosser forms of Parliamentary corruption. In this they have been aided by that which has been an evil in other respects, the plutocratic character of the House of Commons, most of the members of which are too rich to care for a bribe. They have also been aided by that which is in all respects an unspeakable blessing, the almost entire removal of the civil service and the judiciary from the category of party spoils, rotation in office being totally discarded, and even the patronage of the first appointments greatly reduced through the introduction of competitive examination. At the time of the Railroad Mania, there were strong suspicions of direct bribery of members of the House of Commons; certainly there was a good deal of dishonest and even corrupt voting, and the experience of that period strongly suggested that the sort of legislation in which the lobbies have an interest ought not to be vested in a political assembly, but committed to professional authorities whose integrity may be fortified by professional interest and honor, who may themselves be responsible, in case of misconduct, to the supreme government. The principal bribes now are peerages and other honors which have a special value for rich men aspiring to social position. In England however, generally speaking, it is not among the members but in the constituencies that corruption prevails. Parliament legislates rigorously against it, but legislate as we may, while politics are a struggle for office, corruption in some form will continue to exist.

The growth of Demagogism, again, has been somewhat suspended in England by the limitation of the suffrage and by the ascendancy of a political class. Party leaders have made unscrupulous appeals to the passions of the people as well as to the passions of assemblies, which, like larger masses of men, are capable of becoming mere mobs. But there have been comparatively few instances of men leaving the paths of industry to make politics a trade, and comparatively little of the public sycophancy by which demagogues may close the ears of a na

tion against truth as effectually as courtiers by their flattery close the ears of the most besotted despot. The weak point of the elective system seems to lie not so much in the choice of members as in the choice of candidates; in the nomination, in a word, rather than in the election. Once place the right man before the electors, and if they are of average intelligence and honesty they will probably elect him. The difficulty is to get the right man placed before them. He will not, as a general rule, come forward of himself, for generally speaking men of much depth of character and largeness of mind are rather too averse from these competitions and contentions: they are rather too much disposed, as an ancient philosopher says, to stand aside under the shelter of the wall and let the dust whirl by. When there is not a political class designated by its birth for public life, the solution has been found practically in demagogism and caucuses, machinery by which it is morally impossible that the best men should be selected to rule the state. This is a canker at the very root of the system, and one for which a remedy has not yet been suggested or perhaps even sought. A really free and spontaneous exercise of their power of choice by the whole body of electors seems to require not only a general intelligence but a general activity and interest in politics which we can hardly expect to find in the mass of men.

All political philosophy is summed up in the words of Pym: "The best form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of a state to the common good." Universal suffrage expressing the free and rational allegiance of the whole people is the only just and stable basis on which institutions can hereafter rest; and no community which is governed either for or by a class can be considered a community indeed. Elective government has coincided with the higher civilization; it demands far greater moral effort and brings forth proportionately nobler fruits than any other system. But the elective principle will not regulate itself,

and, for want of regulation, it has in not a few instances wrought its own destruction. Even in the countries where the success of the elective system has been greatest, if you subtract the other elements of well-being, such as religion, intelligence, and industry, and against the good done by political agencies set the evil done by faction, demagogism, and corruption, how large will be the balance of good which will remain? The answer to this question is the test of a political system, not mere declamations about freedom.

Faction, demagogism, and corruption, not only interfere with good government; they deprave the moral life of men which it is the object of all government to protect; and if they are not cured or mitigated, the time will come when Humanity, feeling that its higher interests are being sacrificed to its lower, will arouse itself to throw off an intolerable evil, at whatever expense to cherished ideas and institutions.

England moves slowly; but the day cannot be far distant when her statesmen will be compelled to take up organic questions. The House of Commons as at present constituted is not fit to be the government. Consisting of 650 members, it is too large for deliberation. The evil organization of party is almost indispensable to make it work at all. But in other and more fundamental respects it bears the traces of its original character as a representation of the counties and boroughs summoned occasionally and for a short time, not to govern, or even to legislate, but to grant the king money and at the same time advise him as to the needs of the people. It is summoned and dismissed at the will of the ministers of the Crown, the only security for its annual convocation being an indirect one, the necessity of obtaining from it supplies to defray the expenses of government and pay the annual interest on the debt. It is in abeyance during a great part of the year, and in the interval between a dissolution and a fresh election ceases altogether to exist. The system of general elections is objectionable both as changing all the

members of the legislature at once and as giving an undue and pernicious influence to the question or cry of the hour: it opens the floodgates of popular passion, instead of equably registering the progress of public opinion. Milton was quite in the right when he counselled the Long Parliament, which had then made itself the government, to do away with dissolutions and general elections, to declare itself permanent, and fill up vacancies in its body as they arose. Even the hours of session, which are not the business hours of the day, but those of the night, when business is worst done, denote the assembly's imperfect recognition of its present functions.

I have said that England has no written constitution. At one period of her history, and for a short time, she had a written constitution, a remarkable document, and the work of no ordinary hands I mean the Instrument of Government framed by Cromwell and his associates after the execution of Charles I., and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. The constitution embodied in the Instrument of Government consisted of an elective Protector, a Parliament, and a Council of State.

The Protector is elected for life; the members of the Council of State also hold their offices for life; and when a vacancy occurs the Parliament is to send up six names, out of which the Council select two, and of these two the Protector chooses one; so that the Council would be kept pretty well in harmony with the Parliament and the Protector. The powers of legislation and taxation were vested entirely in the Parliament, the Protector having a suspensive veto on legislation for twenty days only. The Council of State was completely associated with the Protector in the conduct of the executive. As to the elective Protector, there may be a doubt whether it is necessary to have any single head of the state; whether the supposed necessity is not a superstition derived from long familiarity with monarchy; and whether we should not be better without any great prize of this kind to stimulate that which requires no stimuVOL. VI.-15

lus-personal ambition. But if we are to have an elective head, there are some reasons for preferring one elected for life to one elected for a term of years: because the regular recurrence of the competition for this prize at stated intervals keeps on foot party organizations, inflames faction, and tends to bring dangerous questions, which might otherwise work themselves out slowly and quietly, to a sudden and violent issue. That, however, which most claims attention in the system embodied in the Instrument of Government is that it is not a party system, the members of the Council of State being elected under conditions which seem to render it impossible that the Council should become a cabinet or cabal. It would not be surprising if the minds of English statesmen should one day revert to Cromwell's constitution, which, though premature in its day and altered almost as soon as it was made, may not be so unsuitable to the present age. It is curious to see how, with the rising ascendancy of the political principles of which Cromwell was the impersonation in his day, the figure of the Protector has come forth from the cloud of infamy behind which it was long hidden and received again the homage of the national heart.

The attempt to found the institutions of the future will be made in England under some critical conditions, partly common to her with other nations, partly peculiar to herself. Peculiar to her, in degree at least, are the contrast between the extremes of wealth and poverty, and the presence of masses of want, ignorance, and criminal propensity close to the streets of luxurious palaces. The proletariat is beginning to appear in the great American cities and to raise the formidable problems connected with its existence; and this is one of the most important elements in the change which has passed over American society since it was observed by De Tocqueville. But in England the danger is at its height, and though the explosive forces of a Faubourg St. Antoine slumber long, in a day of revolutionary excitement they may awake. There is a peculiarity also in the political aspect