as their ancestors did agricultural and industrial machinery. The Americans are still of opinion that more is to be got for human happiness by private energy than by public legislation. The Irish, however, even in the United States, are of another opinion, and the Irish opinion is manifestly rising into favour here. But on the question, whether future democratic legislation will follow the new opinion, the prospects of popular government to a great extent depend. There are two sets of motives, and two only, by which the great bulk of the materials of human subsistence and comfort have hitherto been produced and reproduced. One has led to the cultivation of the territory of the Northern States of the American Union, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The other had a considerable share in bringing about the industrial and agricultural progress of the Southern States, and in old days it produced the wonderful prosperity of Peru under the Incas. One system is economical competition; the other consists in the daily task, perhaps fairly and kindly allotted, but enforced by the prison or the scourge. So far as we have any experience to teach us, we are driven to the conclusion, that every society of men must adopt one system or the other, or it will pass through penury to

starvation.

I have thus shown that popular governments of the modern type have not hitherto proved stable as

compared with other forms of political rule, and that they include certain sources of weakness which do not promise security for them in the near or remote future. My chief conclusion can only be stated negatively. There is not at present sufficient evidence to warrant the common belief, that these governments are likely to be of indefinitely long duration. There is, however, one positive conclusion from which no one can escape who bases a forecast of the prospects of popular government, not on moral preference or à priori assumption, but on actual experience as witnessed to by history. If there be any reason for thinking that constitutional freedom will last, it is a reason furnished by a particular set of facts, with which Englishmen ought to be familiar, but of which many of them, under the empire of prevailing ideas, are exceedingly apt to miss the significance. The British Constitution has existed for a considerable length of time, and therefore free institutions generally may continue to exist. I am quite aware that this will seem to some a commonplace conclusion, perhaps as commonplace as the conclusion of M. Taine, who, after describing the conquest of all France by the Jacobin Club, declares that his inference is so simple, that he hardly ventures to state it. "Jusqu'à présent, je n'ai guère trouvé qu'un (principe) si simple qu'il semblera puéril et que j'ose à peine l'énoncer. Il consiste tout entier dans cette remarque, qu'une

société humaine, surtout une société molerne, est une chose vaste et compliquée." This observation, that "a human society, and particularly a modern society, is a vast and complicated thing," is in fact the very proposition which Burke enforced with all the splendour of his eloquence and all the power of his argument; but, as M. Taine says, it may now seem to some too simple and commonplace to be worth putting into words. In the same way, many persons in who:n familiarity has bred contempt, may think it a trivial observation that the British Constitution, if not (as some call it) a holy thing, is a thing unique and remarkable. A series of undesigned changes brought it to such a condition, that satisfaction and impatience, the two great sources of political conduct, were both reasonably gratified under it. In this condition it became, not metaphorically but literally, the envy of the world, and the world took on all sides to copying it. The imitations have not been generally happy. One nation alone, consisting of Englishmen, has practised a modification of it successfully, amidst abounding material plenty. It is not too much to say, that the only evidence worth mentioning for the duration of popular government is to be found in the success of the British Constitution during two centuries under special conditions, and in the success of the American Constitution during one century under conditions still more peculiar and more unlikely to

recur. Yet, so far as our own Constitution is concerned, that nice balance of attractions, which caused it to move everity on its stately path, is perhaps destined to be disturbed. One of the forces governing it may gain dangerously at the expense of the other; and the British political system, with the national greatness and material prosperity attendant on it, may yet be launched into space and find its last affinities in silence and cold.

ESSAY II.

THE NATURE OF DEMOCRACY.

JOHN AUSTIN, a name honoured in the annals of English jurisprudence, published shortly before his death a pamphlet called a " Plea for the Constitution.” In this publication, which marks the farthest rebound of a powerful mind from the peculiar philosophical Radicalism of the immediate pupils of Jeremy Bentham, Austin applies the analytical power, on which his fame rests, to a number of expressions which entered in his day, as they do in ours, into every political discussion. Among them, he examines the terms Aristocracy and Democracy, and of the latter he says:

Democracy is still more ambiguous than Aristocracy. It signifies properly a form of government, that is, any government in which the governing body is a comparatively large fraction of the entire nation. As used loosely, and particularly by French writers, it signifies the body of the

1 A Plea for the Constitution, by John Austin. London, 1859.