Sixth Series, } No. 2710.-June 13, 1896. From Beginning, CONTENTS. For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents. From The Nineteenth Century. BY JOHN MORLEY. What is democracy? Sometimes it is the name for a form of government by which the ultimate control of the machinery of government is committed to a numerical majority of the community. Sometimes, and incorrectly, it is used to denote the numerical majority itself, the poor or the multitude existing in a State. Sometimes, and still more loosely, it is the name for a policy directed exclusively or mainly to the advantage of the laboring class. Finally, in its broadest, deepest, most comprehensive, and most interesting sense, Democracy is the name for a certain general condition of society, having historic origins, springing from circumstances and the nature of things; not only involving the political doctrine of popular sovereignty, but representing a great group of corresponding tendencies over the whole field of moral, social, and even of spiritual life within the democratic community. Few writers have consistently respected the frontier that divides democracy as a certain state of society from democracy as a certain form of government. Mill said of the admirable Tocqueville, for instance, that he was apt to ascribe to Democracy con sequences that really flowed from civilization. Mr. Lecky is constantly open to the same criticism. Whether we think of democracy in the narrower or the wider sense whether as another name for universal suffrage, or as another name for a particular stage of civilization-it equally stands for a remarkable revolution in human affairs. In either sense it offers a series of moral and political questions of the highest practical importance and the most invigorating theoretical inter est. It has shaken the strength and altered the attitude of the churches, has affected the old subjection of women and modified the old conceptions of the family and of property,' has exalted labor, has created and dom1 Democracy and Liberty. By W. E. H. Lecky! Two vols. Longmans, 1896. inated the huge enginery of the press, has penetrated in a thousand subtle ways into the whole region of rights, duties, human relations, and social op portunity. In vain have men sought a single common principle for this vast movement. Simplification of life; the sovereignty of the people, and the protection of a community by itself; the career to the talents; equality and brotherhood; the substitution of industrialism for militarism; respect for labor: such are some of the attempts that have been made to seize in a phrase the animating spirit of the profound changes through which the civ. ilized world has for a century and more been passing, not only in the imposing institutions of the external world, but in the mind and heart of individual man. We can hardly imagine a finer or more engaging, inspiring, and elevating subject for inquiry, than this wonderful outcome of that extraordinary, indus ment which has awakened in the trial, intellectual, and moral developmasses of modern society the consciousness of their own strength, and certain to expand and to intensify, to the resolution, still dim and torpid, but use that strength for new purposes of their own. We may rejoice in democracy, or we may dread it. Whether we like it or detest it, and whether a writer chooses to look at it as a whole or to investigate some particular aspect of it, the examination ought to take us into the highest region of political thought, and it undoubtedly calls for the best qualities of philosophic statesmanship and vision. If so much may be said of the theme, what of the season and the hour? In ent would seem to be a singularly our own country, at any rate, the prespropitious time for the cool and scientific consideration, by a man trained in habits of systematic reflection, of Lecky's title. The English electorate some of the questions raised by Mr. has just called a halt to all projects of tor and statesman who has for a genconstitutional reform. The great oraeration been the organ and inspirer of popular sentiment in this kingdom, has quitted the stage of public activity. vital realities of his subject, it might Of the two historic political parties, though one is for the moment ens trenched behind a strong parliamentary majority, yet neither feels perfectly secure against deep internal transformation, nor perfectly easy about the direction which that transformation may take. Victors and vanquished alike ostentatiously proclaim their su preme devotion to the cause of social reform, though the phrase is vague and its contents uncertain and indefinite. The extreme wing of what styles itself the Labor party, the Socialist party, or the Collectivist party, has for the hour suffered a signal repulse. Yet nobody with an eye in his head believes that the accommodation of old social institutions to a state of society in which the political centre of gravity has finally shifted, is a completed task, or that the gravest problems involved in that task are not left outstanding and inexorable. on the other hand have been expected! at least to keep him free from its pas-sions. He has large stores of knowledge of other times and other countries, . and he has been accustomed to expa-tiate upon the facts so accumulated, in copious and impartial dissertations.. He might seem to be justified hiss belief that studies of this sort bring with them kinds of knowledge and methods of reasoning "that may be of some use in the discussion of contemporary questions." In other fields he has shown qualities of eminent distinction. From him, if from any living. writer, we should have expected firm. grasp of his great subject, unity of ar- gument, reflective originality, power, . depth, ingenuity; above all, the philo-.sophic temper. In every one of these anticipations it is melancholy to haveto say that deep disappointment awaits the reader. of material. First of all, a word or two as to the. Such a period as this is just the time, form. Mr. Lecky has never been re one would think, for a political philoso-markable for skill in handling, masses. pher to take stock of institutions; to Compare him,. for intrace their real working under the sur- stance, with Montesquieu: he will ad face of external forms; to watch for mit that the thought of the comparison, subtle subterranean changes, to clas- is not uncomplimentary. Montesquieu sify tendencies, to consider outlying subordinates the exposition of facts to or approaching difficulties, to seek so- the generalization; detail and generallutions, and to do all these things with ization are firmly, welded together; as much precision, directness, definite- illustration never obscures nor blocks ness as the highly complex nature of the central idea; two or three energetic the subject will permit. Precision and strokes of the brush bring a mass of directness are not at all the same thing fact into true color, light, and relation; as dogma. As Tocqueville has well in short, Montesquieu is a master of said, the books that have done most the art of composition In these volumes it is very different. Great quanto make men reflect, and have had most influence on their opinions and tities of fact are constantly getting their acts, are those where the author into the way of the argument, and the has not thought of telling them dog- importation of history breaks the thread. matically what they ought to think, of discussion. The contents of an in dustrious man's note-books are tumbled but where he has set their minds on the road that leads to the truths in headlong down, like coals into the hold I hesitate to pro point, and has made them find such of a Tyne collier. truths as if by their own effort. nounce these great quantities of fact irrelevant, because it is not easy to disentangle the author's thesis, to detect his general point of view, or to find a clue through the labyrinth of promiscuous topic and the jungle of overgrown detail. It is impossible to be If the theme is lofty and the hour is favorable, what of our teacher? Mr. Lecky has been removed from the distractions of active life, and though this has on the one hand the drawback of keeping him ignorant of many of the sure what is relevant and what is not. With the best will in the world, and after attentive and respectful perusal, we leave off with no firm and clear idea what the book is about, what the author is driving at, nor what is the thread of thought that binds together the dozen or score pamphlets, monographs, or encyclopedie articles of which the work is composed. Organic unity is wholly absent; it is a book which is no book. You might as well hunt for the leading principle of what is known in parliamentary speech as an Omnibus Bill. There is a pamphlet of forty pages on that novel and refreshing theme, the Irish Land Question. Thirty pages are filled with the minutiæ of Local Veto. Five-and-forty pages go to the group of questions relating to the Marriage Law; we have Roman concubinatus, early Christian marriage, the action of the Council of Trent, the case of Lord Northampton in the time of Edward the Sixth, and so forth through all the ages, down to the deceased wife's sister of the day in which we live, and the ex-lord chancellor who declared that if marriage with the sister of a deceased wife ever became legal, "the decadence of England was inevitable," and that for his part he would rather see three hundred thousand Frenchmen landed on the English coasts. This immense excursus is in its way highly interesting; it lulls us into a most agreeable forgetfulness both of democracy and liberty; but when we reach the end of it and recover the highroad, we rub our eyes and wonder whither we were bound before being wiled into these sequestered bypaths. Then Sunday legislation covers twenty close pages; the observance of Sunday in the Early Church, the laws of Constantine and Theodosius, observance in the Middle Ages, Sunday under Elizabeth, James, and Charles, the Book of Sports, the Puritan Sunday, and so on, almost down to the resolution of the House of Commons a few weeks since for the opening of museums on the first day. A distinguished ambassador was once, not very many years ago, directed by his government to forward a report on the Kulturkampf in Germany; he sent home a despatch of fifty pages, and apologized for not being able to bring things down lower than Pope Gregory the Seventh, but promised more by the next mail. Mr. Lecky is almost as regardless as the ambassador of the limitations set by time, space, and a definite purpose to the employment of human knowledge. Worse than digression is platitude. Simplicity is the most delightful quality in literature, and nothing charms like the naïf. When the simple and the naïf degenerates, it turns to platitude, and that is in writing what insipidity is in the art of the cook, or flatness in a flask of wine. If the reader will begin to collect from these volumes a little anthology or hortus siccus of deliverances of this rather vapid family, he will find the number of well-marked specimens rise over the hundred in no time. For instance: "It is in my opinion an exaggerated thing to prohibit harvest-work in the critical weeks during which the prosperity of the farmer so largely depends on the prompt use of every hour of fine weather." And when he says of children brought up with excessive strictness in religious families: "Being taught to aim perpetually at a temperament and an ideal wholly unsuited to their characters, they fail to attain the type of excellence which was well within their reach. The multiplication of unreal duties and the confusion of harmless pleasures with vice, destroy the moral proportion and balance of their natures, and as soon as the restraining hand is withdrawn a complete moral anarchy ensues." So "depriving the people of innocent means of enjoyment, and preventing the growth of some of the tastes that do most to civilize them, it has often a distinctly demoralizing influence" (ii. 94). Most true; excellent sense; but not startlingly new deeply impressive. As Rivarol said of his friend's distich, "C'est très bien, mais il y a des longueurs." nor Digression and platitude, though harmless in themselves, unfortunately |