DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY VOLUME I. NEW EDITION NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. LONDON AND BOMBAY 1903 COPYRIGHT, 1896, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. All rights reserved FIRST EDITION, MARCH, 1896 FEBRUARY, 1900, NOVEMBER, 1903 INTRODUCTION I HAVE availed myself of the opportunity which the appearance of a New Edition gives to revise carefully this book, correcting such inaccuracies as I have been able to discover and, without attempting to re-write any portion of it, introducing into the text or notes a few lines relating to controversies which were pending at the time of its original publication and mentioning salient facts which have since occurred and which had a direct and important bearing on the subjects I have treated. The task of following in detail the later legislation on those subjects in the many different legislatures of the world must be left to other writers, but it is not, I think, inappropriate to devote a few pages to examining how far the experience of the last three years has confirmed or disproved the general principles I have laid down. In some of its most melancholy predictions this work has, I fear, been but too well confirmed. A great portion of it is devoted to describing the declining respect for parliamentary government and the great difficulty of reconciling this form of government with extreme democracy. I have pointed out the tendency of modern democratic parliaments to break up more and more into small groups with the inevitable consequence of enfeebling the executive; destroying or dislocating |