The conditions of fitness are two: first, you must get a good
legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these are by no means
so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight. To keep a
legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial
business: if you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they
will quarrel with each other about that nothing; where great questions
end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new laws
to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign relations to
adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature,--there is
nothing for it to enact and nothing for it to settle. Accordingly, there
is great danger that the legislature, being debarred from all other
kinds of business, may take to quarreling about its elective business;
that controversies as to ministries may occupy all its time, and yet
that time be perniciously employed; that a constant succession of feeble
administrations, unable to govern and unfit to govern, may be
substituted for the proper result of cabinet government, a sufficient
body of men long enough in power to evince their sufficiency. The exact
amount of non-elective business necessary for a parliament which is to
elect the executive cannot, of course, be formally stated,--there are no
numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitutions; all we can say
is, that a parliament with little business, which is to be as efficient
as a parliament with much business, must be in all other respects much
better. An indifferent parliament may be much improved by the steadying
effect of grave affairs; but a parliament which has no such affairs must
be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.
But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature is evidently secondary
to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two kinds of nations
which can elect a good parliament. The first is a nation in which the
mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are comfortable.
Where there is no honest poverty, where education is diffused and
political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people
to elect a fair legislature. The ideal is roughly realized in the North
American colonies of England, and in the whole free States of the Union:
in these countries there is no such thing as honest poverty,--physical
comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is there easily
attainable by healthy industry; education is diffused much, and is fast
spreading,--ignorant emigrants from the Old World often prize the
intellectual advantages of which they are themselves destitute, and are
annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so
common. The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly
geographical: the population is mostly scattered; and where population
is sparse, discussion is difficult. But in a country very large as we
reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really
comfortable, would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the
New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an
education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the
numerical majority of no people equally numerous has ever possessed: in
a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a
sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create
that legislature. If the New England States possessed a cabinet
government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world
for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness.