tend to bulk. Mr. Lecky's object is not | Carlyle was a carnivore, and Mr. the very broadest, though highly important, being really and in substance not much more than to show the effects of popular government upon the rights of property. For this and the two or three allied or subordinate subjects he takes between nine hundred and a thousand pages. Mill's famous book on "Representative Government" was not one-third so long. Yet it sufficed for a systematic exploration of the most important part of the ground dealt with in these two volumes, and it left the reader with a body of thoughts and principles which, whether they are impregnable or not, are at any rate direct, definite, and coherent. Maine's attack on "Popular Government" may not have been a very searching performance, but like Stephen's "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," it was sinewy and athletic; the reader knew where he was, and he came to the end of his journey in three or four hundred pages. A memorable sermon was preached on Mr. Lecky's text nearly thirty years ago; it was called "Shooting Niagara: and After?" "A superlative Hebrew conjuror," cried the preacher, "spellbinding all the great Lords, great Parties, great Interests of England, leading them by the nose like helpless mesmerized somnambulant cattle," had just passed the Reform Act of 1867-Lath-sword and Scissors of Destiny; Pickleherring and three Parcæ alike being in it. "Inexpressibly delirious seems to me the puddle of Parliament and Public upon what it calls the Reform measure; that is to say, The calling in of new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash, by way of amending the woes we have had from our previous supplies of that bad article." These words would have made a concise and appropriate epigraph for Mr. Lecky's book, and I doubt whether the ordinary reader will carry away with him from this book much more than from Carlyle's summary damnation of democracy and canonization of aristocracy. Yet Carlyle only took fifty pages. But then Lecky has been assigned to the slowbrowsing tribe of the graminivorous. If Mr. Lecky's literary method is bad, I fear that his philosophic temper must be called much worse. In our own generation we have all heard the continental ecclesiastic mourning or raging over the perfidies and robberies of the French Republic or the Piedmontese monarchy; the Southern planter swearing at the violation of vested interests which emancipated his negroes; the drone of the dowager or the spinster of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; the amoebean exchange of their wrongs between a couple of Irish landlords in the smoking-room at Harrogate or Pau. These are assuredly no examples for a philosopher. Mr. Lecky might have been expected to think of such a man as the elder Mill. J. S. Mill tells us that his father was the reverse of sanguine as to the results to be expected from reform in any one particular case; but this did not impair the moral support which his conversation and his very existence gave to those who were aiming at the same objects, and the encouragement he afforded to the fainthearted or desponding among them, by the firm confidence which he always felt in the power of reason, the general progress of improvement, and the good which individuals could do by judicious effort. And the world has not yet wholly forgotten Mill's striking account of the good effects of his official position at the India House upon his own work as a theoretical reformer of the opinions and institutions of his time. The occupation [he says] accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every course, and the means of obviating them, stated and discussed deliberately with a view to execution; it gave me opportunities of perceiving when public measures and other political facts did not produce the effects which had been expected of them; above all, it was valuable to me by making me, in this portion of my activity, merely one wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work together. As a speculative writer I should have had no one to consult but myself. But as a secretary conducting political correspond ence, I could not issue an order or express an opinion without satisfying various persons very unlike myself that the thing was fit to be done. I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could when I could not obtain everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether (Autobiog. p. 85). If the distinguished author of these two volumes had only cultivated this temper; if he had only ever been under the wholesome compulsion of working with other people; if, like Mill, he had forbidden himself to be indignant and dispirited because the heedless world insists on revolving on its own axis instead of on his; he might well have given us a contribution to political thought which should be stimulating, enlightening, and even practically helpful. As it is, we move in an air of pitchy gloom. The British Constitution is plainly worn out. The balance of power within the country has been destroyed. Diseases of a serious character are fast growing in its political life. It is ruled by feeble governments and disintegrated parliaments and ignorant constituencies. Power has descended to classes who are less intelligent, less scrupulous, more easily deceived. Low motives are acquiring a greater prominence in English politics. Extension of the franchise makes a popular cry, and is so simple that it lies well within the competence of the vulgarest and most ignorant demagogue; it has sprung from a competition for power and popularity between rival factions; the leaders reckon that new voters will vote, for the first time at any rate, for the party which gave them the vote, and "it is probably no exaggeration to say that calculations of this kind have been the chief motives of all our recent degradations of the suffrage" (1. 60). This genial and charitable explanation, by the way, seems a little summary when we remember that the most persevering, eloquent, and effective apostle of the "degradation of the suffrage" in our day was Mr. Bright, as upright and singleminded a citizen as ever adorned a State. Then to attack university representation is a horrible fatuity. The assailants, says the author, have rarely the excuse of honest ignorance. They are sycophants, who in former ages would have sought by Byzantine flattery to win the favor of an emperor or a prince, and who now declaim on platforms about the iniquity of privilege on the one hand and the matchless wisdom and nobility of the masses on the other. Many of these declaimers, strange to say, are highly cultivated men, who owe to university education all that they are; they stoop, Mr. Lecky tells us, to the rant of the vulgar demagogue in order to attain personal ends of their own. "I do not think that the respect of honest men will form any large part of their reward” (1. 25). Now was ever discontent so unreasonable? Some people might be excused for a little depression, if life were not too short for depression; but Mr. Lecky has no excuse. At what moment in the century was it easier to find balm for his bruised spirit? When were honest men more triumphantly avenged on the Byzantine sycophants? What more can the most self-righteous of pedants or patriots desire than the result of the general election of last July? "The country had now the opportunity of expressing its opinion about these men, their objects, and their methods, and it gave an answer which no sophistry could disguise and no stupidity could misunderstand. The complete, crushing, and unequivocal defeat of the Radical party in 1895 is certainly one of the most memorable events in the present generation" (i. 362). "The lesson was a salutary one," for it proved beyond dispute the profound conservatism of the masses of the English people and their genuine attachment to the institutions of their country. "It showed how enormously men had over- | profound conservatism, then one wou rated the importance of the noisy groups of Socialists, faddists, and revolutionists that float upon the surface of English political thought like frothflakes on a deep and silent sea" (i. 363). | But is there not a whiff of the Byzantine sycophant here? What has become of the manly and austere words only two hundred pages before (i. 184), about "canonizing and almost idolizing mere majorities, even when they are mainly composed of the most ignorant men, voting under all the misleading influences of side-issues and violent class or party passions"? The blessed events of one blithe summer week have happily transformed this mass of ignorant and passionate dupes into a deep and silent sea of innate conservatism and real attachment to the institutions of their country. But what, again, has become of the haughty lines about those contemptible beings to whom "the voice of the people" as expressed at the polls is the sum of all wisdom, the supreme test of truth or falsehood? Nay, "it is even more than this: it is invested with something very like the spiritual efficacy which theologians have ascribed to baptism. It is supposed to wash away all sin. However unscrupulous, however dishonest, may be the acts of a party or of a statesman, they are considered to be justified beyond reproach if they have been condoned or sanctioned at a general election" (i. 184). Lo, now it seems that one of the most memorable events of this generation does show that there is really some spiritual efficacy, some baptismal grace, some supreme test of truth and falsehood, in the voice of the people as expressed at the polls, after all. While our philosopher is thus mercilessly bastinadoing us with his general election, we can only gasp out between his blows his own lofty words: "Of all the forms of idolatry, I know none more irrational or ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers." And if it be really true that the noisy groups of Socialists, faddists, and revolutionists are in this country mere froth-flakes on a deep and silent sea of ders why three-fourths of this book were ever written. For the secret text of the book in the mind of its author is not very different from Talleyrand's saying: "Democracy-what is it but an aristocracy of blackguards?" If the lesson of the elections was so salutary for the vaulting revolutionary optimist, was it not a little salutary too for the querulous pessimist? If it were a sign of a capacious or an elevated mind always to fly for explanations of conduct or opinions which you do not approve, to the baser parts of human nature, Mr. Lecky would, as we see, occupy a very lofty pedestal. There the censor sits, passing magisterial judgments right and left, not merely on the acts-these are open to the world-but on the motives of the most conspicuous, as of the humblest, men of his time. He pierces the secrets of their hearts; he knows for certain when their ignorance is honest, and when it is dishonest, and it is almost always dishonest; there is no room in his Rhadamanthine nature for considerations of mixed motive; nor for that strange dualism in men which makes them partly good and partly bad, sometimes strong and sometimes weak; nor for thought of the hard alternatives, the grave and divided responsibilities, the critical balancing in sharp emergencies and clouded situations, that press those who meddle with the government of men. All is intelligible, all is discreditable; all is simple, and all is bad. To pretend to believe that manhood suffrage might be a gain to the commonwealth, or that Mr. Lecky's countrymen are fit for self-government, or that a popular constituency is quite as likely to form sound political judgments as a miscellaneous band of Masters of Arts, is to mark yourself either as what has been described as a fool aspiring to be a knave, or else a "new Jesuit," an ignoble place-hunter, a trickster merely "playing a good card in the party game." As for the adoption of Home Rule by British Liberals, and the monstrous enormity of a court for arbitrating Irish rents-introduced by the great betrayer, "with uplifted | part, they ought to be easily seen. Has "a eyes and saintly aspect"-Dante himself could hardly have found word and image to express the depth of Mr. Lecky's reprobation. Even the proposal of 1894 for restoring evicted tenants to their holdings was scandalous instance of political profligacy." To be sure, Lord Clanricarde could have told us as much as that. The great Duke of Marlborough heard a groom riding in front of him cursing and swearing at his horse. "Do you know," he said to a companion by his side, "I would not have that fellow's temper for all the world." Not for all the world would one share Mr. Lecky's conviction as to the mean, the corrupt, the gross and selfish motives of all these poor rogues and peasant slaves with whom his imagination mans the political stage. there ever been a community in the civilized world where such a vast mass of gratuitous work for public purposes is done-work with no taint whatever of sordid personal object or motive, direct or indirect-as we see done every day of our lives in this island? Parliamentary committees, county councils, municipal councils, schoolboards, boards of guardians, asylum boards, quarter sessions-how singular and how unlucky must have been Mr. Lecky's field of observation, if what strikes him most in all these scenes of social activity is, not the devotion and the public spirit and the sacrifice of time and ease, but the play of sordid motives. In truth, this piece of disparagement, as a contradictory passage elsewhere shows, is a mere bit of thoughtlessness. But then, what is the use of a man being a thinker, if he will not think? Mr. Bright once said in a splenetic moment, that the worst of great thinkers is that they generally think wrong. Mr. Lecky is worse still. Then Mr. Lecky writes as if it were a happy peculiarity of "the gentlemen" to make these sacrifices. He applauds "a social condition which assigns to a wealthy class a large circle of necessary duties, and makes the gratuitous discharge of functions the appanage and sign of dignity" (i. 318). As if this were in any special way the appanage and sign of dignity. As if the great mass of public functions gratuitously discharged were not so discharged by plain homely men, who neither claim nor profess any dignity save that which belongs to the faithful and honorable performance of public duty, whether it be done by cobbler or by duke. What more dignity does a man want, and what more can a man have? The dolorous refrain recurs with terrible monotony. In one place the author is arguing the manifold blessings of hereditary aristocracy. A man who is not marked out in any way by his position for parliamentary distinction, he says, is more tempted than those of another class to make sacrifices of principle and character to win the prize, to be more governed by the desire for office or social distinction. The young patrician is less accessible than poorer men to "the sordid motives that play so large a part in public life" (i. 315), As a matter of fact, it has never been understood that in the making of governments, either peers or their elder sons or their younger sons or their relatives and connections of every degree of affinity have been wont to show any indifference to the emoluments of office, but very much the contrary. And if one could compare the amounts of public money received by patrician ministers during the last hun- The author has not even the merit of dred and fifty years, or even the last sticking to his text. While he thinks reformed fifty years, with the money that the more Englishmen are admitted received by plebeians, from Burke to political power, the worse that power downwards, the first would be as a will be exercised, yet at the same time, giant mountain to a minute molehill. strange to say, he is persuaded both But do sordid motives play a large part that the national character is good, and in our public life? Where are we to that it is every day growing better. look for them? If they play a large | Conspicuous improvement, he allows, has taken place in the decorum and humanity of the bulk of the poor; in the character of their tastes and pleasures; in their enlarged circle of interests; in the spirit of providence, and so forth. "The skilled artisans in our great towns within the memory of living men have become not only the most energetic, but also one of the most intelligent and orderly elements of English life" (i. 204). Just so; and this is the very element that was admitted to direct political power by the Reform Act of 1867, of which Mr. Lecky thinks so exceedingly ill. What are we to make of his reiterated assurances that since 1867 the governing power has descended to classes less intelligent, less scrupulous, and more easily deceived? If the "bulk of the poor" are conspicuously improving, and if democracy has placed the decisive or prerogative vote-for this is what it has done-in the hands of one of the most intelligent and orderly elements in our national life, then, how comes it that, in face of all these admissions, Mr. Lecky insists, first, that the ignorance of the electorate is increasing; second, that the electorate is made all the more gullible, bribeable, foolish, and incompetent, since the inclusion of these elements; third, that their inclusion is a degradation of the suffrage; and fourth, that their inclusion was not due to any spontaneous desire or demand of the intelligent elements themselves-who, we suppose, wished nothing else than that their betters should make laws for them-but to the factious competition of rival leaders (i. 59) and the vulgarest and most incompetent demagogues? Was there ever such a tissue of incoherence and inconsequence? The author draws a picture of a kind of men loitering listlessly around the doors of every gin-shop-men who through drunkenness, or idleness, or dishonesty, have failed in the race of life. They are, he says, one of the chief difficulties and dangers of all labor questions. With a low suffrage, they become an important element in many constituencies. Their instinct will be to use the power which is given them for predatory and anarchic purposes (i. 20). But the broken loafer is no novelty in our social system, and any electioneering agent of either party will tell Mr. Lecky that this class in nine cases out of ten is the ardent supporter of Church and queen, and, so far from being predatory, holds the very strongest views as to the righteousness of publican's compensation, for instance. To count these poor losels as a chief difficulty in labor questions, or as aspiring "to break up society," is ludicrous. Still more remarkable is the following passage: It is very doubtful whether the spirit of municipal and local patriotism was more strongly developed either in ancient Greece, or, during the Middle Ages, in the great towns of Italy and Flanders or along the Baltic, than it now is in Birmingham, or Liverpool, or Manchester. The self-governing qualities that are displayed in these great centres, the munificence and patriotism with which their public institutions are supported, the strong stream of distinctive political tendency that emanates from them, are among the most remarkable and most consolatory facts of English life (i. 208). The very facts that bring this consolation for the sorrows of our political Werther, are facts that show that he has no ground for being a Werther at all. A town-councillor (with some qualifications of no bearing on the present argument) is the creature of the same degraded suffrage as returns a member of parliament; he is chosen by the same ignorant, unscrupulous, gullible, bribeable voters; he is presumably exposed to the same low motives that, according to Mr. Lecky, everybody knows to be acquiring greater and greater prominence in English politics. Yet the town-councillor is enthroned on high for our admiration, a worthy rival in public spirit of ancient Greece, medieval Italy, Flanders, and the free towns of the Baltic, while the same electors who choose such a being for local purposes, no sooner think of purposes imperial, than "the highest self-governing qualities" vanish from their minds, and we have as the final result the wretched and unholy |