Military revolts are of universal occurrence; but far the largest number have occurred in Spain and the Spanish-speaking countries. There have been ingenious explanations of the phenomenon, but the manifest explanation is Habit. An army which has once interfered with politics is under a strong temptation to interfere again. It is a far easier and far more effective way of causing an opinion to prevail than going to a ballot-box, and far more profitable to the leaders. I may add that, violent as is the improbability of military interference in some countries, there is probably no country except the United States in which the army could not control the government, if it were of one mind and if it retained its military material.

Popular governments have been repeatedly overturned by the Army and the Mob in combination; but on the whole the violent destruction of these governments in their more extreme forms has been effected by the army, while in their more moderate shapes they have had the mob for their principal assailant. It is to be observed that in recent times mobs have materially changed both their character and their method of attack. A mob was once a portion of society in a state of dissolution, a collection of people who for the time had broken loose from the ties which bind society together. It may have had a vague preference for some political or

religious cause, but the spirit which animated it was mainly one of mischief, or of disorder, or of panic. But mobs have now come more and more to be the organs of definite opinions. Spanish mobs have impartially worn all colours; but the French mob which overthrew the government of the elder Bourbons in 1830, while it had a distinct political object in its wish to defeat the aggressive measures of the King, had a further bias towards Ultra-Radicalism or Republicanism, which showed itself strongly in the insurrectionary movements that followed the accession of Louis Philippe to the throne. The mob, which in 1848 overturned the government of the younger Bourbons, aimed at establishing a Republic, but it had also a leaning to Socialism; and the frightful popular insurrection of June 1848 was entirely Socialistic. At present, whenever in Europe there is a disturbance like those created by the old mobs, it is in the interest of the parties which style themselves Irreconcileable, and which refuse to submit their opinions to the arbitration of any governments, however wide be the popular suffrage on which they are based. But besides their character, mobs have changed their armament. They formerly wrought destruction by the undisciplined force of sheer numbers; but the mob of Paris, the most successful of all mobs, owed its success to the Barricade. It has now lost this advantage; and a generation

is coming to maturity, which perhaps will never have learned that the Paris of to-day has been entirely constructed with the view of rendering for ever impossible the old barricade of paving-stones in the narrow streets of the demolished city. Still more recently, however, the mob has obtained new arms. During the last quarter of a century, a great part, perhaps the greatest part, of the inventive faculties of mankind has been given to the arts of destruction; and among the newly discovered modes of putting an end to human life on a large scale, the most effective and terrible is a manipulation of explosive compounds quite unknown till the other day. The bomb of nitro-glycerine and the parcel of dynamite are as characteristic of the new enemies of government as their Irreconcileable opinions.

There can be no more formidable symptom of our time, and none more menacing to popular government, than the growth of Irreconcileable bodies within the mass of the population. Church and State are alike convulsed by them; but, in civil life, Irreconcileables are associations of men who hold political opinions as men once held religious opinions. They cling to their creed with the same intensity of belief, the same immunity from doubt, the same confident expectation of blessedness to come quickly, which characterises the disciples of an infant faith. They are doubtless a product of democratic senti

ment; they have borrowed from it its promise of a new and good time at hand, but they insist on the immediate redemption of the pledge, and they utterly refuse to wait until a popular majority gives effect to their opinions. Nor would the vote of such a majority have the least authority with them, if it sanctioned any departure from their principles. It is possible, and indeed likely, that if the Russians voted by universal suffrage to-morrow, they would confirm the Imperial authority by enormous majorities; but not a bomb nor an ounce of dynamite would be spared to the reigning Emperor by the Nihilists. The Irreconcileables are of course at feud with governments of the older type, but these governments make no claim to their support; on the other hand, they are a portion of the governing body of democratic commonwealths, and from this vantage ground they are able to inflict deadly injury on popular government. There is in reality no closer analogy than between these infant political creeds and the belligerent religions which are constantly springing up even now in parts of the world; for instance, that of the Tae-pings in China. Even in our own country we may observe that the earliest political Irreconcileables were religious or semireligious zealots. Such were both the Independents and the Jacobites. Cromwell, who for many striking reasons might have been a personage of a much later

age, was an Irreconcileable at the head of an army; and we all know what he thought of the Parliament which anticipated the democratic assemblies of our day.

Of all modern Irreconcileables, the Nationalists appear to be the most impracticable, and of all governments, popular governments seem least likely to cope with them successfully. Nobody can say exactly what Nationalism is, and indeed the dangerousness of the theory arises from its vagueness. It seems full of the seeds of future civil convulsion. As it is sometimes put, it appears to assume that men of one particular race suffer injustice if they are placed under the same political institutions with men of another race. But Race is quite as ambiguous a term as Nationality. The earlier philologists had certainly supposed that the branches of mankind speaking languages of the same stock were somehow connected by blood; but no scholar now believes that this is more than approximately true, for conquest, contact, and the ascendency of a particular literate class, have quite as much to do with community of language as common descent. Moreover, several of the communities claiming the benefit of the new theory are certainly not entitled to it. The Irish are an extremely mixed race, and it is only by a perversion of language that the Italians can be called a race at all. The fact is that any portion of a