Volume 3 — 8. The English Constitution. By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition. London, 1883.

Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation, few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least, he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority who know him as the founder of the English school of historical sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very tolerable but for its pleasures;' and that, probably, will be assigned to some more famous and far less wise causeur or phrasemaker, losing half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy, hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration, Parliament, and the Cabinet.

One common and very striking feature characterizes the political thought of all these men—all of them Liberals in more than mere nominal profession or party connection. All regarded the triumph of Democracy as near and inevitable, and all, from different points of view, regarded it with a mixture of resignation and distrust, strangely significant in men of such different views, of such diverse character, mental training, and personal experience. None of them were fatalists, much less pessimists; none inclined à priori to that political superstition which recognizes, in the tendencies of a thing so uncertain and changeful as the spirit of the age, the hand of Providence, or the indication of 'manifest destiny.' All were men of more than average independence of temper, an independence which, in one or two, approached nearly to that which practical politicians call impracticability. None of them were disposed to be silent when the many-headed Cæsar had spoken. Mill's most striking, and—to the credit of Democracy be it spoken—most popular characteristic, was a stern and almost pardoxical defiance alike of personal consequences and of public opinion. On the verge of his entrance into public life he affronted the working-classes by telling them, with more than Carlylese directness and exaggeration, that they were 'mostly liars.' If ever there were a man sure to protest to the last against false doctrines and mischievous tendencies, to protest the more fiercely the more certain their victory seemed, it was John Stuart Mill.

Tocqueville, conscious of no common political and administrative capacity—a statesman whose strong popular sympathies, practical wisdom, contempt of popular catchwords, knowledge of and respect for concrete facts; above all, whose signal freedom from the characteristic weaknesses and vices of French statesmanship, rendered him the fittest of all men to direct the destiny of France, whose counsels and guidance would have saved her from all the worst mistakes and most signal disasters—was content to spend a lifetime first in opposition, afterwards in absolute exile from public life, rather than go 'the way that was not his way for an inch.' An Orleanist, an enthusiastic lover of Parliamentary institutions, he would not stoop with Guizot and Thiers to serve a King whose power was founded on corruption. A minister of the President, he held aloof as sternly from the despotism of the Empire as from the factions of the Republican Assembly. He never designed to conceal or soften the expressions of the most unpopular sentiments or convictions.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully aware of the necessity of mutual concession—more willing than most to be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical experience of his permanent subordinates—but one whom, assuredly, no one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or popular feeling.

Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, cœteris paribus, to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant, thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their natural bias.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his 'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid vision of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity, liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.

'Even if I were to decide in favour of one of these forms, and against the two others, I should not find myself nearer the solution of the practical problem. A nation does not change the form of its government with the same facility that a man changes his coat. A nation in general only changes the form of its government by means of a violent revolution.... The history of forcible attempts to improve governments is not cheering. Looking back upon the course of revolutionary movements, and upon the character of their consequences, the practical conclusion which I draw is, that it is the part of wisdom and prudence to acquiesce in any form of government, which is tolerably well administered, and affords tolerable security to person and property. I would not, indeed, yield to apathetic despair or acquiesce in the persuasion that a merely tolerable government is incapable of improvement. I would form an individual model, suitable to the character, disposition, wants, and circumstances of the country, and I would make all exertions, whether by action or by writing, within the limits of the existing law, for ameliorating its existing condition, and bringing it nearer to the model selected for imitation; but I should consider the problem of the best form of government as purely ideal, and as unconnected with practice; and should abstain from taking a ticket in the lottery of revolution, unless there was a well-founded expectation that it would come out a prize.'

The conservatism of Lewis was that of a profoundly sceptical instinct, of practical cautious incredulity. Bagehot's was the conservatism of middle-class English thought and experience. Tocqueville's was that of wide observation and bitter disappointment. Mill was a Conservative only so far as conservatism was forced upon a mind essentially radical and even revolutionary, imbued with a profound faith in abstract principles leading far beyond universal suffrage to, if not across the verge of communism, by the danger which he foresaw to individual liberty and unfettered intellectual freedom from the ascendency of mere numbers. Upon this point he agreed closely with Tocqueville, though upon nearly every other their views were as opposite as their character and experience; and their teaching has been fully confirmed by the actual working of the most successful, the most tolerant, and the most fortunately situated democracy that the world has ever seen.

The tendency of Democracy to naked despotism is obvious enough in the recent history of France; but sanguine democrats ascribe the special experience of France to the intense centralization inherited, as Tocqueville shows, by the Republic, the Constitutional Monarchy and the Empire from the Ancien Régime; the absence of any local school of practical discussion, mutual tolerance, and co-operation; the bitterness of factions fighting not for administrative or legislative control, but for fundamentally incompatible forms of Government,—to anything rather than the unfitness of the French nation for Teutonic liberties. Conservative pessimists and democratic optimists can only find a common ground, a test which both will accept, in the experience of the United States. Whatever vices are found in American democracy must be inherent in democracy itself; and it must be granted that, looking on the surface of public life, the larger facts of national history, and the material condition of the people, there is no evidence, obvious to the hasty observer, of interference with personal freedom, of any demoralizing or weakening influence on individual character exercised by political or social equality. It is outside of the proper field of politics, in facts invisible to distant observers, and not visible at a glance to thoughtful travellers, that we must seek for proof of the bearing of democratic institutions and ideas upon personal and social liberty, upon the maintenance of individual and collective rights.

Upon such a point the remarks of a leisurely, thoughtful, cultivated writer, like Richard Grant White, a man who had enjoyed exceptional opportunities of comparing the effect upon daily life of English aristocracy and American democracy, are more instructive than the elaborate treatises of political theorists or the generalizations of historians. The testimony of such writers bears out the inference which careful students might draw from English history, that the influence of a local and landed aristocracy is far more favourable, than that even of a landed democracy, to the jealous and resolute assertion of legal rights, to a strenuous and successful resistance to the encroachments of power, social or political, upon the property, the comfort, the liberty, and the privileges, of individuals or communities. The moral of Mr. Grant White's sketches of English and American life is, that the English peasant or tradesman is far safer from practical oppression or injustice than the American farmer or citizen; that an Englishman, whatever his rank, is far more free to speak his mind, and far more likely to have a mind worth speaking, than one of the same position in France, or even in Massachusetts. The lively interest in, the diffused knowledge of, politics and public matters, found among educated, and even half-educated men and women throughout the upper and middle classes of England, evidently impressed Mr. White by the contrast it presented to the indifference of American 'Society' to State and Federal politics. He notes particularly the higher tone, the wider knowledge, the freedom from petty class and personal concerns, the broader range of thought, the familiarity with subjects of general human interest, which characterize the conversation of an English dinner-table or drawing-room, as compared with that of American clubs and parlours. He speaks, with the bitterness of a man often and deeply bored, of the limited range of American table-talk, the prominence of the 'shop,' the professional interests of each chance assemblage; the price of stocks and railway shares, and the chances and changes of Wall Street; the inferior tone of thought among men and women alike, in the best or at least the wealthiest society of New York and Philadelphia. In this he is incidentally confirmed by so observant and candid a social critic as Laurence Oliphant. There is an American society of higher cultivation and loftier interests; but that society, except in Boston, is necessarily scattered and somewhat exclusive; and, standing wholly aloof from politics, lacks the knowledge of history, of legislation, of social and economic interests, of current opinion, of foreign affairs—which is in itself a sort of liberal, if necessarily superficial, education. American ladies, and even gentlemen, hardly know who are the Senators for their State, much less who is the representative of their district; care nothing for, and know little of, the debates in Congress, still less in the State Legislature, deeply as these may affect the well-being of the community, the laws under which they and their children are to live.

But this lack of interest in public affairs has a deeper and far more reaching consequence. Everybody's business is nobody's business. In a community really democratic there are no natural leaders; none bound by rank, station, and recognized primacy, to originate resistance; none too strong to be crushed by the animosity of a Fiske or a Gould, or grievously wronged by a corrupt corporation like that of New York, a dishonest political organization like Tammany Hall, or a powerful Tramway or Railway Company. The consequence is, that not only the individual citizen, but a whole community submits to high-handed oppression, to administrative and judicial corruption, to impudent usurpation and flagrant illegalities, such as the greatest of English corporations would never dream of attempting. Perhaps the most oppressive and insolent exactions, to which living Englishmen have as yet submitted, are those of the Water Companies of London; but the offenders have repeatedly been resisted and brought to justice; and it is in London alone, the one English city which lacks natural leaders and protectors, which is too large for any citizen or body of citizens—save that great City Corporation which English Radicalism has marked for destruction—to speak and act in its name, that the Water Companies would have been endured for five years. Even in London, no such high-handed interference with the rights of property and the comfort of families, as the Elevated Railways of New York, with their uncompensated destruction of individual privacy and comfort throughout many of the wealthiest streets of the first city in the Union, would have been obviously and utterly impossible.

The tolerance of Democracy for what seem to English ideas the grossest form of oppression—oppression systematic and legal, arbitrary power and class privilege, formally embodied in the law and made a fundamental principle of government—is illustrated by that clause of the Code Napoleon, which exempts the whole bureaucracy of France from civil or criminal liability. No official can be prosecuted, no redress sought at law for the abuse of powers the most extensive, affecting every man's daily life—powers which enable their holder to harass and almost ruin individuals and communities at his pleasure—save by permission of the Council of State, a body of officials inclined of course to believe and to shield its subordinates. This law has been sustained by each successive Government that has seized the reins of centralized power; nor are we aware that any serious effort has been made to repeal it.

The tyranny of democracy is, as Mill insists, the most formidable, searching, and irresistible of all. Under an autocracy or oligarchy, public opinion is the protector of the injured, and imposes limits on arbitrary power. Assassination is the resort of the victim driven to frenzy by individual oppression, and tempers the sternest despotism; but Demos wields opinion and defies the dagger. By general confession life is far less free, individual taste, caprice or eccentricity is kept under far sharper restraint by fashion and feeling, in America than in aristocratic England. At every epoch of American history, the freedom of opinion has been curtailed at certain points within strict if ill-defined limits. The patriots of Virginia proclaimed in 1775 that any who dared 'by speech or writing to maintain' Royalist or Constitutional views should be treated as an enemy of his country. A similar ban was put some fifty years ago upon the Abolitionists of Illinois and Connecticut. A time came when it was almost equally dangerous to maintain the constitutional doctrines which the Abolitionists had assailed. Nowadays, of actual persecution there is little, because there is little need; because the repression acts, save with the most independent, original and contradictious tempers, upon thought rather than expression. No human intellect or character can resist the universal, insensible, unconscious, pressure of the atmosphere which surrounds it from the cradle. Upon certain political, social, and ethical dogmas, wherever national pride and democratic prejudice are touched, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say, that the 'unanimous opinion' of the North and West has demoralized or extinguished thought itself.

Demos is not only tyrant but Pope. He feels, and his courtiers venture openly to claim for him, not only the royalty which can do no wrong, but the infallibility which can define right and wrong themselves. He resents, we are told upon democratic authority, all pretension to special knowledge.

'No observer of American polities' (Mr. Godkin admits in his reply to Sir Henry Maine) 'can deny that, with regard to matters which can become the subject of legislation, the American voter listens with extreme impatience to anything which has the air of instruction; but the reason is to be found not in his dislike of instruction so much as his dislike in the political field of anything which savours of superiority. The passion for equality is one of the very strongest influences in American politics. This is so fully recognized now by politicians, that self-depreciation, even in the matter of knowledge, has become one of the ways of commending one's self to the multitude, which even the foremost men of both parties do not disdain. In talking on such subjects as the currency, with a view of enlightening the people, skilful orators are very careful to repudiate all pretence of knowing anything more about the matter than their hearers. The speech is made to wear as far as possible the appearance of being simply a reproduction of things with which the audience is just as familiar as the speaker. Nothing is more fatal to a stump orator than an air of superior wisdom on any subject. He has, if he means to persuade, to keep carefully, in outward seeming at all events, on the same intellectual level as those whom he is addressing. Orators of a demagogic turn, of course, push this caution to its extreme, and often affect ignorance, and boast of the smallness of the educationale opportunities enjoyed by them in their youth, and of the extreme difficulty they had in acquiring even the little they know. There is nothing, in fact, people are less willing to tolerate in a man, who seek office at their hands, than any sign that he does not consider himself as belonging to the same class as the bulk of the voters—that either birth, or fortune, or education has taken him out of sympathy with them, or caused him, in any sense, to look down on them.'

Historians treat the vote of the present generation as decisive, morally as well as practically, on the issues of the past. The people has, by chance or caprice, passed judgment upon questions, in discussing which consummate statesmen with intimate practical knowledge of their bearings profoundly differed; and that judgment concludes the controversy, determines the right or wrong, the wisdom or folly, of men like J.Q. Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. We have seen too much of this abject superstition in recent English historical essays, as well as in political polemics. It is needless to point out the debasing effect upon all discussion of such anticipatory appeal to the arbitrary decision of Pope or posterity. No man can reason vigorously, frankly, forcibly, and fully, who feels that he, or the heirs of his thought, may be forced not merely to accept defeat, but to cry 'peccavi.' The maxim 'securus judicat orbis terrarum' has no place in historical criticism; and if it had, one nation is not the world, nor the next generation a posterity on whose experience and impartiality reliance might be placed.

M. de Tocqueville is known to the world chiefly by two great works. His 'Democracy in America' was the production of his early manhood. In New England he saw democracy at its best and brightest; saw nothing of that deterioration which the decay of the old Puritan severity, the infusion of a strong foreign element, the corruption and the passions of the Civil War, have confessedly caused. The colonial traditions and principles were still in modified force; simple habits of life, a general prevalence of competence, the absence of ostentatious wealth and luxury, left women content to be mothers and housekeepers; a position of which, as trustworthy witnesses allege, modern luxury, culture, and love of leisure, have rendered them impatient; while the impossibility of devolving their domestic duties upon servants makes the family a burden, and maternity no longer the deepest instinct and strongest hope of womanhood. He saw no beginning of that manifold change of morals and manners which the survivors of an elder generation now regard with deep dismay. His portrait of Democracy, as seen in New England, is decidedly rose-coloured. He saw enough in the Middle and Southern States of the working of democracy under different social conditions, to tinge that picture with the hues of doubt, if not yet with the sombre colours of deep apprehension.

How apt to be partial is the widest and closest political observation is shown by the very partial lessons derived from the experience of the New World. Few observe how signally the history of Central and South America contradicts the inferences so confidently drawn from the United States—or rather from the New England of yesterday, and the present condition of California and the States bounded by the Lakes and the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. Among the States of Spanish and Portuguese speech and civilization—it would be too much to say blood—the failure of democracy has been complete, glaring, and ruinous. Social and political anarchy, utter insecurity of life and property, incessant revolution and murderous war, have been its only fruits. The happy accident of hereditary princes, exceptionally wise, able, and forbearing, has barely saved Brazil. The one prosperous, solvent, orderly State between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn is the aristocratic republic of Chili. So large, striking, and impressive a fact can hardly have escaped a thinker like Tocqueville, whose French birth and experience protected him in great measure from the insular ignorance, rather than arrogance, which leads the ablest English writers to base their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among the political teachers of his age.

In the Ancien Régime we see the seeds of all that is worst and most dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of France will be found in his own writings. Much as there was to admire in the old nobility of France, the people saw it only in an aspect calculated to excite unmingled hatred and contempt. It had ceased to govern, to render any service in return for privileges, exemptions, and exactions so odious, vexatious, and oppressive that no service could atone for them. Even these were forgiven to the resident aristocracy of La Vendée. But absentees supported by such exactions, an Order known to the people not even by neglected duties and ill-directed interference, but solely by demands and extortions unconnected with any remaining or remembered functions, a class whose wealth and luxury were supported not by rents or other returns paid by the tillers of the soil to its original owners, holders, or 'lords,' but by rates, tithes, fines, heriots, monopolies (to use the nearest English equivalents) levied for their benefit, and levied in the worst possible way—what feelings could these excite among a people consciously fainting beneath the load of taxes, corvées, restrictions and imposts, fees and stamps, of which only a part ever reached the empty Treasury of the State? Is it strange that so monstrous a fabric, when those on whose living bodies it was built rose in revolt, should have fallen with a great ruin, and have crushed all whom it had sheltered? 'The guilt of an Order cannot palliate the massacre of its Innocents.' True; but human nature being what it is, the unreasoning burst of fury which strove to stamp out every trace of old institutions, to exterminate the race of the unconscious oppressors, was less strange than the fidelity of the Vendéans.

And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St. Just, and Barère to suppress revolt and discontent by noyades and mitraitlades, if fiendish, is intelligible. It had a political aim. It satisfied a definite if diabolical desire. But the executions of veteran philosophers, of grey-haired parish-priests, of harmless nuns—the deliberate cold-blooded cruelty which punished with death the resentment, the imprudence, often the mere birth, of orphaned lads; the prayers or the tears of schoolgirls who might well hav urged the piteous plea of Sejanus' infant daughter—these recal the indiscriminate ferocity of wild beasts, the atrocities occasionally committed by destructive maniacs in an excess of fury, or the infectious frenzies of lycanthropy and similar forms of epidemic madness, rather than such human cruelty as prompted the massacre of Drogheda, the butchery of Melos, or the destruction of Carthage. What could schoolboys have done worthy of the guillotine, even in the eyes of the Jacobin Club? Girls, like children, can try the temper and patience of manhood, and among rough men or in rough times get roughly punished; but when, save in 1793, did men ever think of killing them? There was but one fault besides their birth—a fault almost inseparable from their birth—which the boy-ensigns and pages, the convent-bred demoiselles, shared with their parents; that inalienable, instinctive, inborn grace, that sense, air, and bearing of superiority, which we find acknowledged alike by the noble and the bourgeois, the von Adel and the bürger, acknowledged by those who regret or resent as distinctly as by those who would uphold it. The unpardonable sin of the noblesse, the inheritance of which they could not be deprived but with their lives, the secret sting that maddened the Jacobin to slay not merely the beardless heirs but the innocent and helpless daughters of the captured chateau, may perhaps be hinted in a question and answer like the following, between Senior and De Tocqueville, after the third Revolution had proved its impotence to efface the footmarks of nature:—

'I said that I was told that the distinction between noble and roturier existed in its full force in real life.

'"Yes," said Tocqueville, "it does, meaning by noble, gentilhomme; and it is a great misfortune, since it keeps up distinctions and animosities of caste; but it is incurable—at least, it has not been cured, or perhaps much palliated, by our sixty years of revolution. It is a sort of Freemasonry. When I talk to a gentilhomme, though we have not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes, and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger." I mentioned the remark to me of a very sensible Prussian, bürger himself, that it was unwise to send out as ambassador any not noble. I said it did not matter in England, where the distinction is unknown. "Yes," he replied, "unknown with you; but you may be sure that when any of our bürger ministers meets one who is von Adel, he does not negociate with him on equal terms; he is always wishing to sneak under the table."'

In these conversations, preserved in a separate series of Senior's Journals, we have the best, latest, and wisest, of De Tocqueville's thoughts; none the less valuable, and to English readers all the more intelligible and impressive, that we have them in undress; put into the terse, pithy, concentrated style of summarized oral conversation by the recorder, instead of being elaborately tricked out in all the formal grace of French literary diction by one of the most fastidious of French writers. Senior, who habitually wrote down in his Journals the conversation of the great, wise, and thoughtful—the leaders of political action or literary criticism, the statesmen and thinkers—with whom in the course of a leisurely life of social observation he was brought into intimate intercourse, had a gift of getting from each man the best he had to give. His friends knew that their table-talk was recorded, often themselves read and corrected the record, and therefore gave him what they were willing to give not to the contemporary world, but to posterity; those opinions upon the current facts of the day by which they were willing to be judged hereafter. No opinions upon the tendencies and consequences, the prospects and passions, the strength and weakness of democracy, could well be more valuable than those which the painter of Democracy in America—after the experience of many years in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,—delivered for the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke with a mind naturally calm, candid, and judicial, enriched by a deeper knowledge than any other Continental writer enjoyed of the working of popular institutions in England and America, matured by the experience of a lifetime; spoke while the most critical experiments in democratic Constitutionalism and democratic Cæsarism were being worked out before his eyes.

Founding a so-called Constitutional Monarchy upon a corruption as gross as that of Walpole, Louis Phillippe had rendered his power absolute at the price of sapping its foundation; and Tocqueville had predicted the Revolution long before accident precipitated it—predicted it as an inevitable result of the corruption he denounced, and indicated the forces of silent discontent which were sure to overthrow it. In 1848, and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace—in the second, chastened by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their own—they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners, whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary culture, of thoughtful habits, and wider experience, in whom they recognized a natural capacity to deal with problems that bewildered themselves, with events that had taken them utterly unawares. But, save at such times, and under the sobering influence of such lessons, equality, and not liberty, is the root of French Democracy. To equality, liberty is readily and unhesitatingly sacrificed.

'"Égalité," said Tocqueville, "is an expression of envy. It means in the real heart of every Republican, 'No one shall be better off than I am;' and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible. In fact, no party desires good government. The first object of the reactionary party is to keep down the Republicans; the second, if it be the second, object of each branch of that party, is to keep down the two others. The object of the Republicans is, as they admit, égalité—but as for liberty, or security, or education, or the other ends of government, no one cares for them."'

It was the passion for Equality that made the Second Empire possible. The city prolètariat would endure anything but a privilege of class, a constitutional monarchy associated in their experience with an artificial peerage and a narrow uniform franchise; the bourgeoisie, terrified by socialism—that is, confiscation—would accept any Government strong enough to put and keep down the Reds, the Anarchists, who under the Republic had kept Paris always within a week—had brought her more than once within twenty-four hours—of sack and pillage. The peasantry hated privilege and Socialism with an equal and impartial hatred. The First Empire had given them much of what they most prized in their actual condition, and was credited with all. Its one hateful association was incessant and at last disastrous war, anticipated conscriptions, and foreign invasion. The Second Empire, with its promise of peace, was the embodiment of their ideal. It promised work to the operative, opportunities of fortune to the restless, and safe investment to the prudent among the middle-class. Its protectorate of the Pope secured the clergy and the women; and it mattered nothing that, crushing under foot the freedom at once of the press and the tribune, it incurred the bitter hatred of the intellectual classes in a country where pure intellect is more ambitious and more immediately powerful than in any other. It stood firm and unshaken while it kept its promise of peace and prosperity—the firmer that it embodied so distinctly the errors and illusions of the many, and not the less popular that it showed so profound and cynical a contempt for the intelligence of the few. Its Budgets alone would have been fatal to a Government resting on and responsible to Opinion, for the rapid growth of the Debt in a time of peace and plenty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the 'capital' and 'revenue' accounts of great Companies, and to calculate the resources of Empires as a peasant the yield of his farm. But the millions were content; the worse the credit of the State, the higher the interest on their savings; the embellishment of Paris and other great public works were a practical acknowledgement of the droit au travail; and the calculations of those, who criticised the fearful waste (coulage) of such a system, proved to demonstration that a spendthrift State must come to the end of a spendthrift rentier—with what consequences the Commune of 1871 bare witness—found no attention; spoke in a tongue not understood by the people. The masses were not even alarmed by the warnings of veteran statesmen, consummate financiers, and doctrinaires of every school. Only in those great crises when all that is left to wisdom is a choice of calamities, as in 1848 and 1871, does Demos abdicate; recognize for a moment that all men are not born, much less trained to remain, free and equal, and entreat the pilots by hereditary profession to see the ship of State through the breakers.

In the criticism, and especially in the best, most thoughtful, and least obvious criticism, provoked by the long foreseen electoral settlement of last year, the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Bagehot's writings was constantly to be traced. On this subject he had looked back and looked forward farther than most political reasoners. Household suffrage seemed to him the inevitable consequence, the logical development, of the reform of 1832. It was at that point, as he considered, that the right and wrong path had diverged; that chance and destiny, rather than choice, determined at the moment the adoption of that which led necessarily and logically to sheer Democracy. The practice of the old system had become throughly vicious, but the underlying principle was sound and safe. All classes, all interests, were represented; but accident had given, not to wealth or birth, but to a particular kind of wealth, a certain set of families, an enormously disproportionate representation. The landed interest was wronged in the utterly inadequate representation of the counties. Ireland was misrepresented; and the Scotch people could not be said to be represented at all. But every class, every great interest, had its spokesmen; exercised a direct and independent influence in the national councils. Rotten or pocket boroughs were not only nurseries of professional statesmanship, but a back door through which interests, whose direct representation was impossible, found access to Parliament. The West Indian interest, the East India Company, and the statesmen trained in its service, with their special knowledge and zealous care for the welfare of our Oriental empire, could secure a hearing for views to which no English constituency would listen. Under such a system our Australian Colonies, the great Dominion of Canada, the English minority which sustains the Imperial cause in South Africa, would never have complained, as now, that their voice was unheard, their feelings unreflected, in an assembly which is no longer merely the Parliament of Great Britain, but the Senate of an Empire greater than that of Rome.

The working classes were represented through those numerous constituencies in which the scot and lot franchise prevailed. It was imperative that the abuses of the system should be redressed; that the new communities which had grown up since the Restoration should be directly represented; that the borough proprietors and the great families should be deprived of their excessive weight in Parliament; that the middle class should acquire a power more adequate to its new social and political importance; that Scotland, again, should be really and directly represented. But in Mr. Bagehot's view universal and varied representation was of more consequence than arithmetical proportion. No class, no interest, represented in the House of Commons, was likely to be grossly wronged, none could be neglected or unheard. No class intelligent enough to understand its own grievances, to have distinct ideas and desires of its own, would have failed, under a reform retaining the principle of the old system, to command attention and secure redress. Had Pitt been able to carry out his well-known and thoroughly sincere scheme of practical reform, or had Canning and his followers sided with the Whigs upon this as upon almost every other question, reform might have anticipated revolution. It was the weakness, rather than the will, of the Whigs that compelled them to go not only farther and faster, but in another direction, than their actual opinions and traditional inclinations would have carried them. They were compelled to present a scheme broad, simple, and extreme enough, to attract irresistible support.

When once uniformity of franchise and proportionate representation were made the basis of the electoral system, the extension of the former, the more and more accurate adjustment of the latter, became a mere question of time. The poorest class of householders in towns in 1886 are probably as intelligent and competent as were the ten-pounders of 1832. The masses might have been satisfied with the gradual enlargement of their old representation; having been once disfranchised by wholesale, it was certain that they would ere long demand and ultimately secure that wholesale enfranchisement, by which every other class must necessarily be swamped. Minority representation, electoral districts, and single seats, are at best lame and unsatisfactory methods of engrafting on pure democracy securities and checks, which were essential and natural parts of the old representation of classes and interests. When once every borough below a certain numerical standard had been extinguished, and all below another deprived of their second member, the upward extension of the principle became a logical and historical necessity. So again much, perhaps most, of what has been written upon the contrast between the American and English constitutions—the two great types of popular government, Parliamentary and Presidential, the direct and indirect election of the actual Executive, terms fixed by law or dependent upon Parliamentary favour—was anticipated in the best chapters of Mr. Bagehot's 'English Constitution.'

Few writers so terse, compact, and clear, have been so completely free from the temptation of deliberate phrase making as Mr. Bagehot; yet few professional phrase-makers have left in the minds of their readers so many telling, forcible, and suggestive phrases; sentences in which a novel or striking thought, an impressive view of new or old truth, a principle apt to be forgotten or imperfectly appreciated, is vivified and incarnated in a few emphatic words. It would be difficult to quote any passage of ten times the length half so suggestive of the exceptional conditions that have secured to England peace and stability during the last two centuries of storm and shipwreck, revolution, and reaction abroad, any phrase so expressive of the distinctive character of the nation and its Government, as the two aptly chosen epithets employed by Mr. Bagehot—the 'dignified parts' of the English Constitution and the 'deferential tendency' of the English people. In both instances he has, as we think, overstated his point. The dignified parts of the Constitution are more real and living, are more intimately associated with the practical work of Government, than he was disposed to allow. Popular deference is paid more to truth and less to fiction than he supposed. It is eminently characteristic of the cautious English temper, the distrust of sharp contrasts and clever paradoxes engrained in his nature, that (so far as we remember) he never adopts the familiar saying of Thiers, that a constitutional Prince règne et ne gouverne pas. But his actual conception of the English monarchy approaches far too near that misleading and mischievous fallacy.

It is a little strange that so devoted a disciple of Darwin, a writer who applied the principle of Evolution with so much skill, insight, and success, to the life of nations and the course of politics, should have allowed so little weight to the natural selection which operates so powerfully upon the character of hereditary Princes and aristocracies. It is far from obvious why so close and careful an observer should have drawn his illustrations of the working of constitutional monarchy so exclusively from the past, and especially from the examples of George III. and William IV., ignoring so completely the experience of the present reign; the deep, lasting, and for the most part wholesome, influence exercised in European politics by men like Leopold I., Prince Albert, and the present Emperor of Germany. Prince Bismarck owes to Royal favour and trust the foundation of his power, the strength which enabled him in the teeth of a short-sighted Liberal opposition to create that Prussian army, to carry out that ruthless but eminently successful policy of blood and steel, which excluded Austria from her place in the Confederation, put an end to the old dualism, and achieved the union of Germany. Italy owes everything to Cavour; but she owed Cavour to Victor Emmanuel. The selection of Russian, Austrian, and German ministers, the consistency of their policy, the power or rather authority, most judiciously used by the Crown at more than one critical period of recent English history, completely refute Mr. Bagehot's theoretical and historical doctrine that a Parliament must be wiser than an average sovereign. He forgets that a Prince is exempt from the influence of party, whose disastrous action in the great crisis of the national fortunes has been brought home of late with painful force to all thoughtful Englishmen.

Nor has he escaped that influence in his criticism of George III. It would be easy to show that the modern theory of Parliamentary Government, the theory accepted by his immediate predecessors and now firmly established, was one on which no scrupulous and conscientious Prince in the position of George III. could possibly have acted. The King found throughout the earlier years of his reign, until the younger Pitt obtained an actual potent and controlling influence in the Houses and in the closet, that the influence which secured a Parliamentary majority was not his ministers' but his own. The dismissal of the elder Pitt and Newcastle broke at once the strongest coalition of aristocratic and popular influence, the mightiest league between intellect sustained by national confidence, borough-mongering wealth, and family interest, that ever dominated the unreformed Parliament. It was in the King's power to give the control of the House to whom he would—to Chatham, Grafton, Rockingham, or North. The one thoroughly unconstitutional use of the Royal influence, with which the King can fairly be charged, was employed to defeat the most unconstitutional and indefensible measure ever brought forward by a corrupt and unprincipled coalition—the India Bill, which endeavoured to secure for Fox and North personally the power and patronage of our Oriental Empire. The King could not shift the responsibility of administration upon ministers who owed office and Parliamentary support to himself. The American war was not his work. The Stamp Act was brought in during his first illness by the minister he most hated. The Tea Duty was the madness of Townshend; and the step, which gave the signal for revolt, was really a remission of two-thirds of that duty. True that the King was the last man to agree to the disruption of the empire, the abandonment of thousands of American loyal subjects, to lower the flag of England before her coalesced European enemies; but in that perseverance, surely not unkingly, he had one enthusiastic supporter; and those who censure the King pass the same censure on the dying speech of Lord Chatham. The one fatal error of a long and conscientious reign should be laid to the account less of George III. than of those who betrayed Pitt's counsels and played upon the conscientious vagaries of a half-crazed brain.

Mr. Bagehot dwells exclusively upon the unfavourable incidents of a royal education. He overlooks the direct and indirect influences which are brought to bear from the very cradle upon an hereditary Prince—the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of a great position, the familiarity with the gravest interests, a youth passed under the tuition of the ablest masters, and above all that constant intercourse with the finest intellects of the age, which secure for a future King a moral and intellectual training unequalled in its excellence. The effect of that training we see in our own Royal family, unfortunate as they have been in the withdrawal at the most critical period of a father's control and guidance. Of the Queen's daughters it is needless to speak. Her sons are, by general admission, soldiers and sailors of more than average professional ability. The Crown Prince of Germany, the late King of Spain, the present heir of the House of France, Leopold II. of Belgium, and King Humbert of Italy, are generally credited with high ability; and more than one of them would take rank among the first statesmen of his Kingdom. A Prince of fair abilities, with such a training and such knowledge of the men with whom he is necessarily brought into contact, has every means of knowing, at least as well as Parliament, who are the most competent and most trustworthy statesmen to whom he can commit the fortunes of his Kingdom. His continuous, experience of politics, legislation, and government, his access, especially with regard to foreign affairs, to wider and more impartial sources of information, lend to his counsels an authority which no prudent or thoughtful statesman will disregard. He looks at affairs from a higher point of view, with a wider survey as a rule, and also with a calmer and more unbiassed judgment.

Mr. Bagehot dwells at length on what may be called the fictitious value of Constitutional Monarchy; and this he was evidently inclined to exaggerate. The English people, he thought, are, as a rule, too ignorant to understand what the Queen's Government really is—how completely it is carried on in the Royal name by Parliamentary Ministers. For them the law is really incarnate in the Sovereign; in yielding obedience to magistrates and policemen, to common law and Parliamentary statutes, in forbearing or resisting riot, they obey or uphold the Royal authority. Were they aware that at each general election they choose their real and effective rulers for an indefinite period, they would be confused, alarmed, and bewildered, to a degree which would render them incapable of a real and intelligent choice. The people—the lower orders—may have been, when Mr. Bagehot wrote, and probably are now, somewhat wiser and better informed as to the real character of the Government—the actual responsibility for particular measures—than their critic supposed. But it is beyond doubt that the Queen's name is a great power. The law is too mere an abstraction, the names of Ministers represent too much party feeling, excite too much antagonism, to command the prompt obedience, the loyal reverence, the enthusiastic support which is rendered to the name of the Sovereign. In France and America a very different feeling prevails.

Mr. Senior, than whom no Englishman of his day was more intimate with a number of French statesmen of different parties, views and character—than whom there was, perhaps, no cooler, closer, or more constant observer of French politics—remarks that Frenchmen are always weak and timid in upholding, daring, resolute, and even fierce in resisting the powers that be. Confidence, enthusiasm, conviction, seem in every case of insurrection and dangerous riot to be on the side of the mob. The revolution of 1848 afforded very striking examples of this contrast. The overthrow of Louis Philippe, deeply as the King himself was disliked and despised, narrow as was the electorate, unpopular as was the Ministry, was the act of a small minority. The Republic was imposed upon France by a knot of reckless journalists and semi-communistic dreamers, backed by the dreaded populace of Paris, against the will of the peasantry who formed four-fifths of the voters, and of the educated or semi-educated classes, amounting to one half of the remaining fifth. Again and again was the Provisional Government—though backed by all who had anything to lose, by all who dreaded anarchy—on the point of overthrow, and saved only by Lamartine's eloquence from the conspiracy of a few thousand desperadoes, and the stormy passions of a mob that hardly knew what it wanted. The Assembly itself was invaded and terrorized for several hours: the lives of the leaders, to whom all France looked up with reverence, were in imminent peril at the hands of a faction numerically insignificant. Only in the terrible days of June did the National Guard, after four months of distress and incessant panic, of daily and hourly fear of sack and pillage, act with energy and decision; and even then the struggle between the army, supported by the National Guard and the Anarchist faction of the barricades, was long balanced and doubtful: yet the party of order in Paris itself constituted an overwhelming majority.

In America, New England perhaps excepted, the mob and the people, the party of lawless force and law-abiding principle, meet on more equal terms. No one dreams of disputing, in the last resort, the authority of the Sovereign, but that Sovereign is invisible and inaccessible. It must be remembered, moreover, that more than one of the hundred popular risings, that the Union has seen during its hundred years' existence, were risings, not against the law, but for the law against the laxity of its administrators. This very fact makes it the more clear how uncertain and ineffective is the authority of abstract law and an impersonal Sovereign. The legal authorities, State or Federal, are not necessarily representative of the power by which they are elected. In California, after a period of anarchy, the respectable classes rose with the tacit support of the people against the State Government which the people had elected; deposed it almost without an effort, and established in its place the arbitrary rule of a self-appointed Vigilance Committee, whose members no one knew. That lawless Government hanged as many rowdies, pilferers, highway robbers and card sharpers as it thought fit; banished hundreds under penalty of death—a penalty sure to be enforced—re-established order, and laid down its power without having encountered the shadow of legal or popular resistance. We have seen an actual insurrection of the better elements of society provoked by the escape of murderers and other criminals through the hands of lax or corrupt juries, and of an administration whose use of the prerogative of mercy was imputed to partisanship or to bribery. But in a great majority of instances, riots that have reached the proportions of insurrection have been simply anarchical or rebellious. It is not so long since the railway employes of Pennsylvania, striking work upon an every-day quarrel between employer and employed, took possession of the iron highways of the State, intercepted communication, seized the great railway arsenal of Pittsburg, and fought a pitched battle against the militia, as obstinate and almost as sanguinary as the minor combats of the Civil War. While we write, another strike of the same class has suspended the traffic of the great Western railway line. In three States the militia have been called out to protect property and liberty, the rights of capital, the freedom of labour, the interest of the public, against a class insurrection; the public authorities have been forcibly resisted, and lives have been lost in a skirmish with fire-arms between the posse of the Sheriff and the insurgent Knights of Labour. Every American mob feels itself invested with something of the majesty of the sovereign people. Every body of English rioters—political, social, or simply lawless—knows and feels itself guilty of resistance to the Sovereign. The truncheon of the police, the uniform of the soldier, unquestionably represents the legal will of the Sovereign; and before that will the largest and most excited multitude gives way at once.

Mr. Bagehot overlooks the certainty which personal sovereignty gives: the absence of a moment's possible doubt on which side is that supreme arbiter, sure to be backed by nine-tenths of the physical forces of society. He underrates, if he does not altogether ignore, the much wider and deeper influence of the Royal name; its power over passion as well as over ignorance. The omnipotence of Parliament, even when, in the belief of half the nation, a Parliamentary majority represents a minority of the people, is due less to traditional respect for the House of Commons, or superstitious reverence for a majority vote, such as prevails in America, than to the fact, that resistance means rebellion, visible, unmistakable disobedience to the Queen. It is therefore deeply to be regretted, not for any sentimental reason, but for the sake of order and the protection of life and property, that the democratic changes in our Constitution are gradually undermining the habit of submission to the Queen's Majesty which still characterizes, to a great extent, the English people. The Services still feel proud to consider that they serve, in their own phrase—not the State but—'the Queen.' That sentiment of loyalty, which Mr. Bagehot ascribes to the ignorant alone, is as strong in the upper or middle as in the lower orders; has a far wider, deeper influence than he allows, than it was consistent with the whole scope of his work on the English constitution to recognize.

One of the most remarkable and interesting points in Tocqueville's conversations, as recorded by Mr. Senior, is the value which he and other interlocutors ascribe to the English Poor Law. Mr Senior had seen its essential principle, the right of subsistence, worked out farther—to extremer and more dangerous consequences—than perhaps any other political or social experiment, before the practical common sense of England interfered. Under the old Poor Law, at least in the rural districts, the income of a household was regulated by its number. Every head of a family was entitled to an allowance, increasing with its increase, and wholly independent of his earnings. Nominal wages had been actually forced down below the starvation point. The law had demoralized industry by placing the idlest ditcher on a level of comfort with the best ploughman, and threatened to swallow up property in the support of poverty. Tocqueville and his friends had seen the danger from another point of view. The most popular and most formidable of the dogmas of that Socialism, which had infected so deeply the prolétariat of Paris and other French cities, was in another and yet more insidious and destructive form the doctrine of the Poor Law. The right of subsistence was admitted by the establishment of the ateliers nationaux, and asserted by the insurgents of June, 1848, under the nobler and more dignified guise of the droit au travail. The State was bound, according to that doctrine, not to keep the idle alive, but to furnish the industrious with work suited to their skill at market rate of wages; a rate which had no right to fall below the average standard of an artizan's needs, or rather of his habits.

A principle which contradicts the laws of nature is obviously false; and the right to subsistence—if claimed not for all who do, but for all who may, exist in a given country—yet more clearly the droit au travail of which this is the practical meaning—involves the demand, that agricultural production shall keep pace with population. But, save for checks all ultimately reducible to the fear of want, checks which it is the essential object of a Poor Law to relax, population would rapidly, in any old country, overtake subsistence. That, were the population of England or France to multiply at an American rate, it would soon lack standing room, is mathematically demonstrable. A poor law then must be attended by checks on population as effective as those of Nature herself; and from their artificial character necessarily more offensive, revolting, and difficult to enforce. None the less, Englishmen familiar as Senior with the ruinous operation of the old Poor Law, Frenchmen confronted like Tocqueville by the terrible theory of the droit au travail, the alarming experience of the ateliers nationaux, were inclined to regard that admission of the right to subsistence—limited to those actually born—which is the fundamental principle of the present Poor Law, as a most valuable, if not an indispensable, guarantee of social security; a signal instance of that practical English wisdom, which refuses to push admitted principles, sound or false, to consequences undeniably logical, but practically dangerous.

It might be thought that in a Christian, and especially a Roman Catholic country, the danger of starvation could never be very practical—that men, and still more women and children, bearing in their forms and faces the stamp of actual want, of pinching hunger, would never be denied. But Senior's experiences of the Irish famine pointed to a different conclusion. Death by famine is at last rapid, sudden, and unexpected. On the road to Kenmare, from which many Irish emigrants were despatched to America, corpses were daily found with collapsed stomachs and money in their pockets. Hoping to reach the port, keeping their money to pay their passage, death had overtaken them unawares; and this in the face of organized measures of relief, the largest and most liberal that public or private charity has ever provided. In cases of prolonged and extreme distress, but for the Poor Law, hundreds would die of want almost unawares, before want had overcome their reluctance to beg. And if actual starvation were rare, yet in the absence of a recognized right to food and shelter, the fear of starvation must be ever present. This spectral horror, Tocqueville evidently thought, haunted the imagination of the French operative; and had much to do with the popularity of Socialism in a country of diffused property and general thrift, and with the ferocity of Socialistic or Red Republican insurrections. Charity, however liberal, is an uncertain and—to their credit be it spoken—to the majority of French operatives, a repulsive and degrading resource. It cannot exorcise the hideous spectre of actual famine, which, though remote, seems ever to threaten them, their wives and their children; and which in times of distress and depression looms terribly near, distinct, and horrible. No wonder that men haunted by such a spectre should be driven to gloomy envy, sullen hate, and outbreaks of ferocity worse than those provoked by actual suffering. No wonder that any schemes, however frantic and however unrighteous, should have charms for a class whose reason is disturbed by the perpetual vision of that ultimate but undeniably possible horror. We have seen in France within the last few weeks moral portents which can hardly be ascribed to any other final cause an atrocious murder committed by workmen, and, what is infinitely worse, extenuated and almost approved by responsible legislators. It is probable that the Belgian riots approach as near as any witnessed in Europe during the last two centuries to a revolt of actual want. Belgium has secured an artificial manufacturing prominence—a disproportionate trade to hard toil and low wages. The latter had lately been forced down to the minimum, as profits had been well-nigh extinguished, by the general depression of business. In fear of actual want, the populace rose, wasted farms, destroyed factories, plundered and levied blackmail—in a word, tried to inflict on others the misery that had maddened themselves. The word has been given to the most quiet and law-abiding people in Europe to defend themselves: a step far more significant of stern intentions than the sharpest military repression. Yet the Government is forced to accompany its preventive measures with an expenditure of 20s per head of the population on public works—equivalent to an English rate in aid of twenty millions! Could there be a more conclusive proof that the dread of hunger is a real and a terrible power for evil among Continental nations; that their choice lies, in a word, between a recognition of the right to subsistence—a Poor Law with severe labour tests and restrictions—and periodical, spasmodic measures of relief enforced by insurrection? Or can there be a doubt, that the latter is infinitely the more dangerous and demoralizing alternative: that only the adoption of a Poor law can prevent the lessons of 1886 from shaking the very foundations of order, property and civil government in countries situate as are France and Belgium?

It seems strange that French Democracy should not have long since insisted on laying for ever the spectre of starvation by a Poor Law more liberal than that of England. It must be remembered, however, that the democracy of France is a propertied and landed democracy, heavily burdened with taxes and interest on mortgages, pinched by necessity, and pinching itself by thrift. No class is so hard to want, so ruthless to idleness, as a peasantry which wins for itself a bare subsistence by constant toil, and provides for the future by constant self-denial.

The temper of a progressive and prosperous democracy is very different. Many, perhaps most of the American States, are without a Poor Law. Slavery dispensed with it, and the race antagonism consequent on the manner and circumstances of emancipation has rendered a thorough revision of social relations—a systematic attempt to meet the new and very exceptional conditions of Southern society in its present form—hitherto impossible. Yet, by the confession of one of their bitterest enemies, no people are so tender, so generous, so lavish of active sympathy towards the sick, the bereaved, and the unfortunate. In States which, probably from an instinct under their circumstances just and wise, refuse to recognize the right to subsistence by a legal provision for the poor, whereby the idle and vicious would chiefly benefit, nevertheless paupers by the visitation of God—the aged and infirm, the blind, the deaf, and dumb, lunatics and idiots—are amply provided by public and private charity with all that can alleviate their lot: or teach them, as far as possible, the means of self-dependence. American charity towards the victims of great natural catastrophes, far more common there than here—communities burned out by a forest fire, or ruined by a flood—and yet more the personal sacrifices made, the readiness with which men and women devote their leisure thought, and energy to the supervision of public institutions, the efficient distribution of public subscriptions, the succour and nursing of a community stricken by pestilence, are above praise. A careful study of Transatlantic examples might put our own boasted lavishness of charity to shame.

Even in England, organized private charity, wisely directed, might surely contrive to effect a discrimination between those who are paupers by vice, unthrift, and idleness, and those whom God has striken for no fault that humanity is entitled to pass judgment upon; between the fitting inmates of the workhouse, and those—helpless from age, infirmity, accident, and disease—to whom the associations of the workhouse are humiliating, painful and demoralizing. Nothing is more essential, under democratic rule, than the maintenance of due severity towards those who will not work; nothing more likely to relax that needful severity than its indiscriminate application to those who cannot.