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 moderne, 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 whom 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 evenly 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.

nation, or the lower part of the nation, or a way of thinking and feeling favourable to democratical government. It not unfrequently bears the meaning which is often given to the word "people," or the words "sovereign people," that is, some large portion of the nation which is not actually sovereign, but to which, in the opinion of the speaker, the sovereignty ought to be transferred.

The same definition of Democracy, in its only proper and consistent sense, is given by M. Edmond Scherer, in his powerful and widely circulated pamphlet, named "La Démocratie et la France." I shall have to refer presently to M. Scherer's account of the methods by which the existing French political system is made to discharge the duties of government; but, meantime, the greatest merit of his publication does not seem to me to lie in its exposure of the servility of the deputies to the electoral committees, or of the public extravagance by which their support is purchased. It lies rather in M. Scherer's examination of certain vague abstract propositions, which are commonly accepted without question by the Republican politicians of France, and indeed of the whole Continent. In our day, when the extension of popular government is throwing all the older political ideas into utter confusion, a man of ability can hardly render a higher service to his country, than by the

2 La Démocratie et la France. Études Paris, 1883.

par Edmond Scherer.