In the Colonies, at least in Canada, there are a good many of us who
believe, not in the expansion of England, but in the multiplication
of Englands, and to whom Imperial Federation, or any scheme for the
political re-absorption of an adult and distant Colony into its Mother
Country, appears totally impracticable. Yet we regard the Mother
Country not only as the object of our filial affection and pride,
but as the centre of our civilization, feel a practical as well as a
sentimental interest in everything that touches her, and tremble at her
danger as at our own.
We look on from a distance, it is true; and though the cable transmits
to us the news, it does not, nor do even the newspapers and the
correspondents, transmit to us the mind of England. In this respect our
judgment may be at fault. On the other hand, we are out of the fray; we
stand clear of English parties; we care for nothing but the country;
we see, while those immediately engaged do not see, the heady current
of faction, ambition, chimerical aspiration, political fatalism, and
disunionist conspiracy hurrying the nation towards a bourne which all
the speakers and writers on the Franchise Bill and the Redistribution
Bill, by the vagueness of their speculations on the practical results,
proclaim to be unknown.
The electorate, that is to say, the government—at least the body by
which the government is appointed and its policy is determined—is
undergoing reconstruction on the largest scale. Yet we look in vain,
even in the speeches of the great statesman who is the author of these
measures, for any forecast of their practical effect, of the influence
which they will have on the character of government, or of the sort of
policy which they will produce. Able and impressive as the speeches may
be, there is little in them but philanthropy and arithmetic, neither
of which is politics. The effect of the Redistribution Bill especially
is evidently a matter of the merest conjecture. Lord Salisbury thinks
that it will act in one way, and Mr. Chamberlain that it will act in
another. The first considers it favorable to aristocratic reaction,
the second considers it favorable to authoritative democracy. The
Bill is a leap in the dark. In any case less important than that
of a reconstruction of the national institutions, safe experiments
would probably precede sweeping change. A new mode of paving would be
tried first in one or two streets; a new mode of cultivation would
be tried first in one or two fields. But if you proposed to try
the Redistribution Bill in one or two specimen districts, a chorus
of scornful reprobation would arise from all parties, sects, and
ambitions. Nor would any voices be louder than those of some who are
foremost in hailing the advent of political science, and preaching
the necessity of a scientific method in all things. This is not a
deliberation on the amendment of national institutions; it is a battle
of parties. Each party is seeking not so much to improve the government
as to make it the instrument of particular theories or passions. But
this surely is what a government, an executive government at least,
ought not to be. A government ought to be the impartial guardian for
the whole nation of law, order, property, personal rights, and the
public safety; while opinion is left to shape itself by discussion,
reach maturity, and at length impress itself on legislation. This
whole movement is pre-eminently the work of party, and inspired by its
passions. Reform in 1832 was really national; the nation earnestly
desired liberation from a corrupt oligarchy. But the subsequent
suffrage agitations have been mainly set on foot by the politicians for
the purposes of their party war.
Democracy has come. By all reflecting men its advent seems to be
acknowledged, by most it is welcomed as bringing, so far as we can see
or so far as experience, though chequered, informs us, an increase
of happiness to the masses of mankind, and therefore, in the highest
sense, to all. But it requires to be organized and regulated; otherwise
the end will be anarchy and, as the inevitable consequence of anarchy,
a relapse into a government of force. Republics, as we have more than
once seen, are capable of suicide. The people is no more divine than
kings, though its divinity was proclaimed by the Maratists; it is
capable of governing itself as wrongly as any king can govern it. The
ignorance, the passions, the self-interest, not only of particular
classes, but of all of us alike, need to be controlled, as far as
institutions can control them, and eliminated from the Councils of the
State. The Americans, as was said before, have tried to organize and
regulate democracy. The framers of the American Constitution—no veil
of illusion being spread before their eyes by the surviving forms and
names of an old monarchy—saw the problem which destiny had set before
them. It was not such a problem as would be presented to them by the
America of the present day, with its New York and its Chicago, its
flood of foreign immigrants, and its enfranchised negroes; far less
is it such a problem as Great Britain, with the populace of its great
cities, its host of Radical and Secularist artisans, its uninstructed
millions of farm laborers, and its disaffected Irishry presents to the
British statesman. They had to deal only with the Puritan freeholders
of New England and the planters of the South. Still they saw the
necessity of providing a solution, and a solution they produced—one
not in all respects correct, even in its day (for the mode adopted
of electing the President was a fatal error), yet effective as well
as deliberate, and such as has sufficed, notwithstanding the great
increase of the strain upon the machinery, to shelter civilization and
avert anarchy. They instituted an executive government invested with
actual power and existing independently of parties in Congress, a real
though suspensive veto, a Senate elected on a Conservative principle,
a written constitution in the keeping of a Supreme Court, by which
all powers and jurisdictions are strictly defined and limited, and
which can be amended only with the deliberate consent of the nation
at large. Besides, as was said before, the Federal system itself, by
localizing questions and breaking the sweep of agitation, has a highly
Conservative effect. These safeguards, with the political qualities
of the Anglo-Americans and the Germans, prevent a catastrophe which
without them would certainly come. But England has nothing like them.
She has nothing but an “ancient throne,” now stripped of the last
vestige of political power, and an aristocracy which is evidently
doomed, and, by its struggles to retain its obsolete privilege,
stimulates revolution. The only Conservative institution which is
really effective is the non-payment of Members of Parliament; and this
Democracy has already marked for abolition.
One could wish for a blast of the Fontarabian horn to awaken British
statesmen, in this decisive hour, to the fact that England, though she
has the consecrated form, has no longer the substance of monarchical
government. Her only government is the House of Commons, or a committee
of leaders of the dominant party, holding their offices during the
pleasure of that House. In the electorate is the supreme power; this
is now not only the fact but a recognized fact. Twice the Ministry,
after submitting its policy to the judgment of the constituencies by a
dissolution of Parliament, has resigned in deference to the verdict.
Yet these same statesmen go on dealing with the electorate as though
they were not dealing with the government or with the sovereign power,
but only with a representation of the people convened for the purpose
of assenting to taxation. They seem to fancy that flood the electorate
as they will with ignorance, passion, and all the elements of violence
and anarchy, the government will still be carried on calmly and wisely
by the occupant and the Ministers of the “ancient throne.” Is it
possible that the mere phrase “servants of the Crown” can cast such a
spell over practical minds?
Down to this time the political history of England has been a long
revolution, of which the Whig or Liberal party in its successive
phases has been the organ, and by which, after many oscillations
and vicissitudes, supreme power has been drawn from the Crown and
the aristocracy to the Commons. The destructive part of the process
is now all but complete, only a small remnant of precarious power
being retained by the House of Lords. The constructive part remains
to be performed. The task of British statesmen at the present day
is, in effect, to found a Democratic Government. The ground has been
cleared for the new edifice, but the edifice has yet to be built. Its
foundations have hardly yet been laid.
Without giving way to reactionary panic, it may surely be said that the
times are critical. They are not evil; they are full, on the contrary,
of the unripe promise of good; but they are critical. Statesmen cannot
afford to act blindfold. Democracy comes, as it was likely that it
would come, not by itself, but as part of a general revolution,
political, social, and religious. Nihilism marks, by its all-embracing
lust of destruction, the connection between the different revolutionary
forces, while it exhibits them in their delirious excess. The English
reform movement in the early part of the century was almost exclusively
political; other agitations were called into being by the general
disturbance, but they were secondary and subsided; the main object
sought was the removal of abuses in government; the leaders were strict
economists, and, far from seeking a social revolution, would have
recoiled from the idea. But a momentous change has taken place since
that time. The fermentation is now not only political but general.
Political power is sought by the masses and their leaders, not merely
for the sake of purifying the administration and reducing its cost,
but in the hope that it may be used to effect a great social change.
Secularism has become an important factor in the situation. Rate
religious influence, and that of faith in a future state as low as you
will, it can hardly be denied that the patience of the masses under the
inequalities of the social system has hitherto been largely sustained
by the belief that the system was a providential ordinance, and that
those who did their duty in it, even if they suffered here, would be in
some way made happy in the sum of things.
Nor has the doctrine of spiritual equality been without its effect in
consoling the lowly for their inferiority of rank. Hereafter scientific
conviction, derived from the study of the social organism, may supply
the place of religious impressions as a motive for acquiescence in
things as they are. At present it is the destructive process of science
that has almost exclusively taken place in the mind of the Radical
proletarian. Believing now that this world is all, he naturally
desires to grasp his full share of its good things without delay. His
sensibility having been quickened with his intelligence, he feels
inferiority as well as privation, and is impelled by social envy as
well as by desire. His education has advanced just far enough to enable
him to imbibe theories which coincide with his wishes. If he cannot
understand the fine reasonings of Mr. George, he can understand the
confiscation, and he thinks that so much fine reasoning must make the
confiscation moral. Communism and semi-communism are rife; there is a
tendency to them even at the Universities, and in other high places.
Perhaps the loss of faith in the Church leads some to see an indemnity
for it in a communistic polity. If there is not in England, as there
is in Germany, a strong Socialistic party, there appears to be a
growing disposition to make a Socialistic use of the suffrage. There is
certainly in many quarters an exaggerated idea of the powers and duties
of the fictitious being styled the State. One conspicuous candidate for
the succession to the leadership, at all events, is evidently holding
out hopes of a Socialistic system of high taxation for the benefit of
those who produce least, and he appears inclined to head a crusade
against the property of all landowners, and of all owners of houses
in towns. Nor is he without rivals in this quest of popularity on the
Tory side. The ball of agrarianism which has been set rolling by recent
legislation in Ireland, rolls on, and its course is not likely to stop
in Skye. All this may be working for good. The writer of this paper, at
all events, has no inclination to take the despondent view. But surely
there is enough to warn statesmen that they must exercise forecast,
that they must try, while they can, to secure to the nation a stable
and rational government; that they must not hastily divorce power from
intelligence and responsibility; that they must not plunge the country
headlong into unorganized and unregulated democracy. If this Parliament
comes to an end without having created any conservative safeguards,
while it has instituted a suffrage destined evidently soon to be
universal, the reins will have been thrown on the necks of the horses,
and the last leverage of Conservatism will be gone. M. Taine has just
shown us whither horses with the reins upon their necks may run, and
what wreck they may make of their own hopes. It is true that great
resignation, and even apathy, has been sometimes shown by the masses in
times of suffering from dearth. No doubt the masses move slowly; but
you incite them to move when you thrust into their hand the vote and
send among them people to teach them that by a violent use of it they
can raise themselves to the level of the rich. Able and powerful men
of the ruling class itself are now, either from philanthropy or from
party motives, doing their utmost to pave the way for a Socialistic
revolution.
Of all the calamities that ever befell the human race, the greatest
was the French Revolution. Wide, happily, is the difference between
the France of a century ago and the England of the present day. In the
case of England there is no Versailles, no deficit, no gulf between
the aristocracy and the middle classes; while there is diffused
intelligence instead of a night of political ignorance in which all
sorts of spectres stalked, general habits of self-government in
place of a paralyzing centralization, and a political character, as
we may flatter ourselves, stronger and sounder than was that of the
French. Still there are some points of similarity, especially the
dangerous conjunction of social or agrarian with political revolution.
In England, as in the France of the eighteenth century, scepticism
has gained the minds of the ruling class; with their convictions
their nerve is shaken, and it is difficult to see who would stop the
avalanche if once it should begin to slide. Nor is there wanting a
sybaritic Jacobinism which ominously reminds us of the Palais Royal.
Pleasure-hunting and frivolity, athletic and of other kinds, appear
to have reached a great height, and to public questions a sort of
careless fatalism seems to prevail. No doubt there is still plenty
of force and of seriousness in the country; but something like a
convulsion may be needed to bring them to the front. The masses in
France, though galled by the burdens of feudal lordship were not,
properly speaking, Socialistic. Socialism proper can hardly be said to
have shown its head before the conspiracy of Babœuf; and the nation was
still at the core monarchical and Catholic, as was proved by the ease
with which both monarchy and Church were restored by Napoleon. Should
the manufacturing and maritime supremacy of England be still more
severely challenged and continue to decline, an amount of suffering
might be produced among her people hardly less than was, in reality,
that of the people in France. If Socialistic legislation commences in
earnest, and, as the inevitable consequence, property begins to shrink
from circulation and investment, stoppage of industry and dearth of
bread cannot fail to ensue, and we know what the effects of these would
be in the middle of a Socialistic revolution. Much ought to be risked,
if there were real hope of equalizing, by any political action, the
human lot. But who seriously believes this to be possible? Who does not
know that the things which we deplore and are slowly mending will only
be made worse by convulsions?
Surely, if this work were in the hands of patriotic and comprehensive
statesmanship, not in those of party, there would be, instead of a
mere extension of the Franchise, a revision of the Constitution.
Before, by the admission of a large popular element, the strain upon
the conservative and regulative parts of the machine was increased,
those parts would be looked over and put in order; this question of the
Second Chamber would be settled, and if the result was a determination
to reform the House of Lords, that determination would be carried into
effect, and the institution would be placed in a condition to do its
work, before the next general election.
In a reform of the House of Lords it is difficult to feel any
confidence. The hereditary principle seems to be thoroughly dead. In
the Middle Ages it had a root in the faith and in the ignorance of
mankind; it had its temporary uses, and at the same time it had its
correctives. A mediæval lord was obliged to exert himself that his
lordship might not be taken by another. A mediæval king was obliged to
exert himself if he wished to keep his crown upon his head. Now, except
in the rare cases of men moulded of Nature’s finest clay, with whom
nobility acts really as an obligation, hereditary rank and wealth kill
duty in the cradle. It is found impossible to get a decent attendance
in the House of Lords. In answer to Lord Rosebery’s appeal, a Peer says
that he will be happy to attend if the nation will re-enact the Corn
Laws, so as to enable him to keep a house in town. To indulge a mere
whim, the hereditary wearers of the crown refuse to visit Ireland, and
thus fling away the affections of the Irish people. The historical
cause has been tried during this controversy and the issue is not
doubtful. We have seen how the House of Lords, since it assumed its
present character, which it did under the second Tudor, has worked.
That it has acted as a court of mature wisdom, revising on grounds
of impartial statesmanship the rash decisions of the popular House,
is as complete a fable as its Norman pedigree. It has simply opposed
the selfish resistance of a privileged order to change of every kind.
Could it have its way, not only Rotten Boroughs and Sinecurism, but the
old Criminal Code, Religious Intolerance, Arbitrary Imprisonment, the
Censorship of the Press, the Paper Duty, even Slavery and the Slave
Trade, would still be cumbering the earth; or, rather, long ago, the
nation would have been compelled to choose between political death and
revolution. To fear, on questions which caused national excitement, the
House of Lords has at last given way; but not to reason and justice. A
multitude of minor reforms it has strangled, by its obstructiveness,
altogether. The only great measure of change which this organ of
mature wisdom ever readily passed was the Franchise Bill of 1867,
which was described by its own author as a leap in the dark, and had
been devised with the view of swamping progressive intelligence in a
flood of ignorance and beer. Nor has obstruction been the only sin of
that order of which the House of Lords is the organ; it has given to
the general policy of England a class bias; it stimulated the crusade
against the French Revolution, and unlike the crusading Barons of the
Middle Ages, it stayed at home revelling in high rents and in a mass of
sinecures, of which it sacrificed not one penny, while the people bled
and starved in a cause which was not theirs. It has fostered militarism
generally as a diversion from domestic reform. On economic questions
the legislation of the Lords has been mere landlordism. As mere
landlords they have acted, from the day on which they sold the national
religion to the Pope for a quiet title to the Church lands, to the
day on which they passed the Arrears Bill, after showing their sense
of its character, in order that they might recover some of their back
rents. If twice in the course of their long history they have been for
a moment on the side of freedom, fear for their Church lands, combined
with jealousy of ecclesiastical favorites, was the cause. The period of
their most complete ascendency, in the last century, was the epoch of
political corruption; and the conduct of the House at the time of the
railway mania, when it formed a Ring in the landlord interest, was, to
say the least, not a proof that hereditary wealth lifts its possessor
above commercial motives. Many histories are darker than that of the
House of Lords; few are less heroic; and the facts are now deeply
imprinted on the minds of the people. Faith in the “noble blood” of the
scapegrace son of a law lord, once dissipated, is not likely to return.
The hereditary wealth itself, which is the real basis of aristocratic
influence, and without which the Peerage would be a thing of shreds and
patches, is reduced by agricultural depression, and will be greatly
broken up by the abolition of primogeniture and entail,—a change
which is sure to come, for it will be found that the only antidote to
agrarian communism is the free acquisition of land. The hereditary
principle is dead, and can serve England or civilized humanity no more.
Introduced into, or retained in, any Senate, it will carry with it the
seeds of death. As soon as it obeys, as obey it certainly will, its
obstructive instinct, the cry against it will be renewed. It will not
become less odious by becoming weaker. If the life element which it is
proposed to introduce remains antagonistic to the hereditary element,
the tribunal of mature wisdom will be divided against itself and fresh
conflicts will ensue. If it is assimilated, you will have the House of
Lords over again, and more odious than ever, since the life element
will be regarded as having apostatized and betrayed its trust.
Yet the whole theory of a Second Chamber as a necessary part of
Parliamentary institutions appears to have no other origin nor any
sounder basis than a mistaken view of the nature of the House of
Lords, which all the world has supposed to be a Senate, when in fact
it was an estate of the feudal realm, representing not a higher grade
of deliberative wisdom but simply the special interest of the great
landowners. The only valid argument in favor of the retention of the
House of Lords is, in fact, the difficulty which the Bicamerists find
in devising anything to be put in its place. Nomination is a total
failure; the nominated Senate of Canada is a legislative cypher, the
debates of which are not even reported, and the places in it are a mere
addition to the bribery fund of the party leader. If both Chambers are
elective, as in Victoria, the result is a collision and a deadlock,
out of which, in the case of sovereign assemblies, there would be no
colonial officer or governor to point a way. Co-option in any form,
or election by an order, would give us the oligarchy over again,
perhaps in a worse shape than ever, since the members would have to
cultivate the good graces of a privileged and reactionary electorate.
Not only as to the mode in which their Senate is to be elected are
the Bicamerists at fault; they are equally at fault as to the special
materials of which it is to be composed. If age or wealth is to be the
qualification, impotence or odium will be the result. If the wisest are
to have their seats in the Senate, the popular House will be deprived
of its best leaders. Supreme power must centre somewhere; it will
centre in that body which most directly represents the national will.
Let the assembly, then, which is the seat of supreme power, be the
seat of collective wisdom. Concentrate in it, as far as possible, all
the best available elements, those of a conservative character as well
as the rest. Frankly recognize its authority, and invest it at the same
time with a full measure of responsibility. Notoriously the existence
of a Senate diminishes the sense of responsibility in the popular
chamber, and diminishes it out of proportion to the control really
exercised; for a Senate soon gets tired of incurring the unpopularity
of rejection. This surely is a more rational and hopeful plan than
that of abandoning the seat of supreme power to popular impulse, and
affixing by way of safeguard an artificial regulator to its side.
Checks and balances belong to mechanics, not to politics; in mechanics
you can apportion force, in politics force cannot be apportioned,
though nominal authority may. That there are good and useful elements
in the House of Lords, especially among the new creations, nobody
doubts. Let them be transferred, with any social influence which in
these democratic times may adhere to them, to a sphere where they can
act with effect. At present they are ostracized by seclusion, as is
clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a
reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and
Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans
against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in
the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they
do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and
the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the
French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might
have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the
_Tiers Etat_, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces
in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious
privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time
make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship
to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for
founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by
heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can
the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course
must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save
itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform?
Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a
well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual
securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion
in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by
successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore
the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its
functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more
important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely
choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is
now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually
to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the
capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and
until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education,
must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape
bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue
or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow
ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question,
some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and
the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight.
The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French
peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a
reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel,
representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest
demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about
the Cider Tax or Wood’s halfpence? An ordinary citizen, occupied in
trade or manual labor, has not the leisure, if he had the knowledge
and capacity, to study the complex questions put before him. Yet there
are reformers who desire to set Hodge to choose not only out of the
worthies of his own neighborhood, but out of all the notabilities
of the country, among whom the largest vote would probably be polled
by the Tichborne Claimant. From selfishness the poor are at least as
free as the rich; they would vote at least as well if they knew how;
but the knowledge is to them unattainable. In no sphere but that of
politics does anybody propose to thrust upon people power of which it
is manifestly impossible that they should make an intelligent use.
Not only is it manifestly impossible that the people should make an
intelligent use of the power of direct election to the governing
assembly and of determining its policy: it is morally impossible that
they should really make use of it at all. They are unorganized, and,
though they live in the same district, unconnected as a rule with each
other: they have no means of taking counsel together for the selection
of a member. The selection must therefore be made for them by some
self-constituted agency. That agency is the Caucus, into the hands of
whose managers and masters the representation, styled popular, really
falls.
Both the party organizations in England are now adopting the system,
and thus confiscating the suffrage which they profess by legislation
to bestow. One of them at least already has the Boss, and both of
them will soon have the complete machine, with a host of professional
politicians, recruited from the class which prefers place-hunting to
honest trades. Government, in a word, will fall into the hands of
irresponsible intriguers, and will be dominated in ever-increasing
measure by Knavery and corruption. Nor is there any assignable remedy
for the evil; the wire-pullers and professional politicians alone
can give their time to the elections, and therefore it is hardly
possible to organize the means of casting off their yoke. Attending
“primaries” is often preached as the duty of the patriotic citizen;
but the patriotic citizen who does attend the primary finds everything
arranged by the wire-pullers beforehand and himself impotent and
a laughing-stock. This will not appear in the first flush of a
revolutionary movement, while the present leaders retain their
ascendancy, but it will appear as soon as the revolution settles down.
Public education, it is true, has been introduced in England; but it
has always existed in the United States, and it has not saved that
country from the Boss. To save the country from the Boss is now the
highest aim of the best citizens; but they will hardly succeed without
a constitutional change.
American reformers, if they want to go to the root of the evil, have a
light to guide their efforts in the successful working of their Senate,
which, being elected indirectly, through the State Legislatures, is
a body of remarkable ability, and possesses the general confidence
of the nation; while the House of Representatives, elected directly
by the people, that is, by the wire-puller, who usurps the functions
of the people, presents a most unfavorable contrast. Those who have
sat in both say the difference between the two political atmospheres
is immense. Rid the Senate of Party, and it would be about as good
a governing body as any nation could reasonably desire. Indirect
elections through local councils is the plan which seems to promise the
best central legislature; and it takes from the primary elector nothing
which at present is really his. Ordinary knowledge and intelligence
ought to suffice to enable a man to choose from among his neighbors
those who are fittest to manage his local affairs. But the local
councillors would be a comparatively picked body; they might reasonably
be expected to give their minds to the central election; they would not
be too many for concert; and they would exercise their power as a trust
under the eyes of the people. As permanent bodies they could not, like
the College of Presidential Electors, be reduced to the mere bearers
of a mandate. A high trust, by adding to the importance and dignity of
local councils, would be likely to draw into them better men. Through
such an organization, apparently, opinion might freely and quietly flow
from the people to the depository of power. Local and social influences
would no doubt be strong; but they are more wholesome than that of the
Boss, and, as was said before, it is easier to enlarge the parochial
than to make the wire-puller honest. Parochialism, however, has been
pretty well broken up by the press and the telegraph. Hardly anybody
can now live in intellectual isolation. The Caucus itself, so far as
it works fairly, is a tribute to the principle of indirect election.
To begin by passing a measure of Home Rule, not for Ireland alone,
but for the United Kingdom, to reconstruct the local institutions,
unloading upon them part of the now crushing burden of the central
legislature, and then to base the central institutions upon them,
is a policy which might at least claim attention, and, perhaps,
deserve partial experiment, as an alternative to central revolution,
if the nation and its leaders had not surrendered themselves to the
revolutionary current.
Like the mode of election, the qualification for the franchise has
never undergone any rational consideration with reference to the
changed status and duties of the elector, who, instead of being really
a subject, is now a participant in sovereign power. Nothing has been
thought of the property qualification, which by successive agitations
has been reduced to the vanishing point, and the next time anybody
wants to raise the political wind will finally disappear. The broader
the basis of electoral institutions can safely be made the better, and
with indirect instead of direct election to the central legislature,
it would be safe to make it very broad. Still some qualifications are
necessary, even for the primary elector; nor, if the writer may trust
his own observation, is there any indisposition on the part of the
intelligent working-classes to look at the matter in that light. A
common education is now placed within everybody’s reach by the help
of the State, and it entails corresponding obligations. A mode of
ascertaining that the elector could read and write, or at least read,
by means of a certificate or test, might surely be devised. Personal
application for registration would also be a fair requirement, since
a man would hardly be fit to share the sovereign power who did not
care enough about his vote to ask for it; and it would probably
act as a useful criterion, self-applied. With the full powers of a
citizen should also go, in reason, the full duties—liability to serve
on juries, to assist in the enforcement of the law, to take part,
if called upon, in the defence of the country. There is a vague
notion that all human beings, or all who pay taxes (which, directly
or indirectly, everybody does), have a natural right to a vote, and
this is carried so far that votes are about to be given to a multitude
of Irish who openly profess themselves the enemies of the State, and
announce that they will use the votes for its destruction. Perhaps
this Irish experiment may help to bring us all to reason, and convince
us that nobody has a right to the means of doing mischief to himself
and his fellows, or to anything but that form of government which is
practically the best for all.
Considering how our morality and happiness depend on the maintenance
of right relations between the sexes, it is surely a proof of the
desperate recklessness of party that the Conservative leaders should
be willing to fling female character and ultimately the home into
the political caldron for the sake of gaining the female vote. Their
calculation may prove unfounded; at least on this continent the
women of Conservative temperament seem to stay at home, while the
revolutionary Megæra mounts the platform and, brandishing her torch
among the Anarchists of Chicago, bids the poor trust in dynamite
instead of trusting in God. That gentleness and purity will come
with woman into public life is certainly not the decisive verdict of
experience, so far as experience has gone. It rather seems that her
gentleness and purity depended on her absence from the political arena.
Will the government be improved by being made feminine? That is the
question to be answered in the common interest of both sexes. The male
nature, though not higher, is the more practical. Men, as a rule, alone
are brought into daily contact with the world of action by the varied
experiences and exigencies of which the balance of political character
is formed. Men alone can be said to be fully responsible. Unless
sentiment should undergo a total change, a female Member of Parliament
or office-holder could not be called to account like a man. In this
rough world how will a nation prosper which is swayed by the emotions
of its women? The sexes may be co-equal, and yet, having different
natures, they may have different parts to play in the community as
they certainly have in the family. Laws have been made by man, because
law, to take effect, must have force behind it, and the force of the
community is male. If women made such laws as some of them threaten
to make in the interest of their sex, men would refuse to execute the
law. If women voted a war for some object of female enthusiasm, as
the French women would for the defence of the Pope, men would refuse
to march. The authority of government would then fall. A woman cannot
support the police or take part in the defence of the country. Women
are not a class with separate interests of its own, but a sex, the
political interests of which are identical with those of their husbands
and brothers. Their property is not of a special kind, nor can it be
alleged to have suffered any wrong by general legislation. Assuredly
general legislation has of late not been unfavorable to woman. Perhaps
they get more from the chivalry of male legislation than they would
get if, armed with political power, they were fighting for themselves.
To the argument that property held by them is unrepresented, the
answer is that no property is represented in any hands beyond the
minimum required for a qualification in each case. This is a small
hardship compared with the practical exclusion from voting of all our
sailors, the flower of our industry, and of a large number of those
employed by commerce in the work of distribution. Woman, if she has
her disabilities, has also her privileges, which, with the general
guardianship of affection, the majority of the sex would probably be
unwilling to renounce for the sake of gratifying the ambition of a
few. Conservatives especially may be expected to consider the effects
likely to be produced on female character and on domestic life by the
introduction of women into politics and the general revolution in
the relations between the sexes of which that measure is an integral
part. Female aspirations begin to take a new turn. An American apostle
of woman’s rights told us plainly the other day that she considered
maternity a poor aim for a woman’s ambition. Nature answers by dooming
the race to decay.
A stable, though responsible, executive, invested with a reasonable
amount of authority, commanding the general confidence of the people,
and capable of exercising forecast and governing on a plan, especially
with regard to foreign affairs, is a necessity of civilized life. How
is it to be secured for the future to England? Have reforming statesmen
asked themselves that momentous question, or has the necessity of
answering it been hidden from their eyes by the illusion which
surrounds the “ancient throne?” What basis has Government at present
but party? Is not that crisis crumbling to pieces? Is not the Liberal
party in the House of Commons split up into discordant sections and
held together solely by the authority of a leader in his seventy-fifth
year and without any visible heir of his power? Have not the Irish
entirely severed themselves from it and taken up a position which
renders a reunion with them hopeless? Is not even the Tory party,
though as a party of reaction less exposed to disintegration than a
party of progress, went by divergent tendencies towards Conservatism
on one side and Tory democracy on the other? Is not everybody at a
loss to conceive how, after next election, and when the number of
Parnellites shall have been increased, a party broad and strong enough
to support a government is to be formed? The disintegration is not
confined to England; it extends to all countries in which Parliamentary
institutions prevail. It is extending now to the United States, where
the reforming Republicans voted in the Presidential election; and the
other day the Liberal party in Belgium suddenly split in two. The
consequences everywhere are the fatal instability and weakness of
government, the only exception being Germany, where Bismarck holds
himself above party, governs on a principle really monarchical, and
makes up a majority from any quarter that he can? France, with her
Chamber full of Sectionalism, cabal and unruly ambition, lives always
on the brink of administrative anarchy: industry and commerce never
knowing whether next day they will have the shelter of a government
over their heads. The Executive in the United States stands on an
independent though elective footing; if it depended for its existence
from day to day on the factions of Congress, chaos would soon come.
Is there any prospect of a return to party union and solidity? As
intellects grow more active, idiosyncracies more pronounced, ambitions
more numerous and keen, is it likely that divergences will become fewer
and that patient submission to party discipline will increase? Is not
the tendency everywhere the opposite way? What permanent claim has
party on the allegiance of a moral being? What is it but a soft name
for faction, the bane of States? Why should a good citizen surrender
his conscience to it? Why should good citizens for ever divide
themselves into two hostile camps, and wage political war against each
other? Is an unpatriotic and anti-social principle to be accepted as
the last word of politics? The supply of organic questions cannot be
inexhaustible. When it is exhausted and divisions of principle have
disappeared, on what ground of reason or moral motive are parties to
rest? Must they not thenceforth become factions pure and simple? Have
they not become factions pure and simple, whenever organic questions
have ceased to be at issue? Party has been the organ by which in
England the Long Revolution has been conducted to its issue, and
power has been gradually wrested from the Crown and transferred to
the Commons. Hence the belief, shared by the whole of Europe, that
party was inseparable from Parliamentary institutions, and that in
no other way could free government be carried on. If free government
can be carried on in no other way, the prospect is dark, for party is
apparently doomed, alike by morality and by the growing tendencies of
the age. But there is obviously one other way at least in which free
government can be carried on. Instead of making office the prize of
a perpetual faction fight, the members of the Executive Council of
State may be regularly elected by the Members of the Legislature for
a term certain, under such a system with regard to the rotation of
vacancies as may at once secure sufficient harmony between the two
bodies and a sufficient continuity in the executive government. The
responsibility of the Executive for the decisions of the Legislature,
and its obligation to resign upon every Legislative defeat, which is
a mere accident of English history and devoid of rational foundation,
would then cease. The Legislature and the Executive would be at liberty
each to do its own work. The Executive would be national, and would
receive the general support of the community instead of being an object
of organized hostility to half of it; it would be stable instead
of being as it is now throughout Europe ephemeral as well as weak.
Responsibility on the part of its members instead of being diminished
would be increased. It would become individual, whereas now it is only
collective, the whole Cabinet and the party majority being bound to
support each Minister whatever may be his failure in duty. Personal
aptitude might be considered in the elections to the offices, whereas
at present little can be considered beyond the necessity of providing
for all the leaders, and a good financier or Minister of Marine would
not be turned out because he was in the minority on a Franchise Bill.
The nations have been so much engaged in taking authority out of bad
hands, that they have forgotten that it is a good and necessary thing
in itself. Government has become dangerously weak. The greater part
of its energy is now expended, not in the work of administration,
but in preserving its own existence. Not only is it exposed to the
incessant attacks of an Opposition whose business is to traduce and
harass it, but it is now hardly able to sustain itself against the
irresponsible power of the press, wielded nobody knows by whom, but
often under secret influences, which are a great and growing danger in
all communities. To keep the popular favor, which is to them the breath
of life, the members of the Cabinet have to be always on the stump,
reserving to themselves little time for rest or reflection, and the
stump orator is rapidly superseding the statesman. This vacillation of
policy on the Egyptian question, the consequences of which all have
been deploring, has not been so much that of the Government as that
of the nation itself worrying and distracting the Government through
the press. A country with an Empire and a world-wide diplomacy cannot
afford to have an Executive, the policy of which is always shifting
with the wind of opinion, and which can exercise no forecast, because
it is not sure of its existence for an hour. In India, the danger is
not so much from native disaffection as from British agitation, which
the Company managed to exclude, but which, since India has been driven
into the vortex of British politics, a party Government has no power to
control. Those who are as far as is the writer of this paper from being
Imperialists, must see, nevertheless, that while the Empire exists it
creates a special necessity for a strong and undemagogic Government,
and that on any hypothesis, a disruption, or general dissolution from
a collapse of the central authority, is not the thing to be desired.
The Radicals themselves are saying that what the country now wants is
a strong government, by which, however, people often mean a government
strongly imbued with their own ideas.
England ought not to be very much in love with the party system at this
moment, for it has well-nigh laid her, with all her greatness and her
glory, at the feet of Messrs. Healy and Biggar. Faction and nothing
but faction has brought her to the verge of a dismemberment, which,
by carving a hostile Republic out of her side, would reduce her to a
second-rate Power, and condemn her to play a subordinate instead of a
leading part in the march of European civilization. “England has lost
heart” is the exalting cry of Mr. Parnell. She has lost heart because
she is betrayed by faction, seeking under highly philanthropic and
philosophic pretences to climb into power by bartering the unity of the
nation for the Irish vote. With a truly national government she would
soon be herself again.
There is another point which, while time for consideration remains
to them, British statesmen will surely do well to consider. It would
seem paradoxical to say that England, the parent of constitutional
government, has no constitution; but it will be admitted at once that
she has no legal constitution, at least that her legal constitution is
not actual. Actually she has nothing but a balance of power, or rather
the power no longer balanced of the House of Commons, which if the
Crown attempted to govern would stop the supplies, and if the Lords
attempted to vote would force the Crown to coerce them by a swamping
creation, or incite the people to terrify them into submission. The
term “Constitutional,” though it seems full of mysterious and august
meaning, has never really denoted anything but the limit of practical
force. If it has been unconstitutional for the Lords to amend a money
Bill, but constitutional for them to reject a Bill respecting a tax, as
in the noted case of the paper duty, the reason was that the rejection
was final, whereas the amended Bill would go back to the Commons, who
would throw it out. But while the Commons have annihilated the power
of the Crown, and reduced that of the Lords almost to a cipher, they
remain themselves liable to dissolution at the will of the party leader
into whose hands that prerogative has come, and who can thus suspend
at any moment the existence of the supreme government, reduce its
members to private citizens, and, if they resist, deal with them as
common rioters through the police. In the ordinary course of things the
existence of the supreme government is suspended, and an interregnum
ensues, whenever the regular Parliamentary term expires. This is hardly
the sort of ship with which it is wise to put out on the wide waters
of democracy. England, like other nations under the elective system,
needs a written constitution, defining all powers and duties, guarding
against any usurpation, and entrusted to the keeping of a court of
law. Traditions and understandings, which may be maintained and serve
their purpose so long as the government is in the hands of a family
group of statesmen walking in the ancestral paths, will not command
the same respect in a far different order of things. The written
constitution is the political Bible of the United States, and without
it all would soon be usurpation and confusion. A written constitution
in no way interferes with the freedom of development which is the
supposed privilege of the unwritten. It only provides that development
shall proceed in the way of regular and legal amendment, and not in
that of violent collision and intimidation by street parades. The
system of constitutional amendment works perfectly well in the United
States. The power might be safely reposed in the people at large. Men
who are not competent to vote on the complex question of the general
policy of the country, and at the same time on the merits of the
candidate, are competent to vote on a single question submitted by
itself, and with regard to which, moreover, there is little danger of
corruption or illicit influence. But the nation at large ought, by
petition sufficiently signed or in some other way, to have the power of
initiating constitutional amendments or compelling their submission by
the Government as well as of rejecting them when submitted. Elective
rulers, once installed in power, are no more willing to part with it
than kings. Such a body as the American House of Representatives,
though it might become a sheer political nuisance, would never take the
first step in reform. There ought to be a power of enforcing change,
when the necessity for it has become apparent to the nation, without
having recourse to a violent revolution, or even to intimidation such
as is being used in default of a better means to wrest the veto from
the House of Lords.
These are the views of one who has long been convinced that the day
of hereditary institutions had closed, that the day of elective
institutions had fully come, that the appointed task of political
science was to study the liabilities, weaknesses and dangers of the
elective system with a view to their correction or prevention, and that
the mission of the Liberal party in England was to conduct the critical
transition and guide Europe in accomplishing it without revolution. If
such views are condemned as Conservative by Radicals, and as Republican
by Conservatives, neither charge can well be repelled. They certainly
cannot be congenial to any who exult in the prospect of a socialistic
revolution. But the upshot of all that has been here said is that
Democracy must be organized and regulated. Unorganized and unregulated,
it will probably end in confusion.—_Contemporary Magazine._