questioned, and assumed as incontrovertible axioms in the popular discussion of the day. We have been suddenly converted to all the fallacies we used to take a pride in detecting. All the ideology, all the "metapolitics," to use the expression of my friend Stein, the inveterate confusion between politics and philosophy, or between politics and religion,-all this has now become naturalised in England. And, indeed, how could it be other wise? Those mistakes are inevitably made by beginners in politics, and we have transferred the control of affairs into the hands of beginners.

Nominally, indeed, we have all admitted that the newly enfranchised classes ought to receive some sort of education to prepare them for their political functions. And yet nothing has been done for this object.

We

seem to have set our minds at rest by one of the worst of those rhetorical sophistries by which we drug ourselves, the sophistry of speaking of the suffrage as being itself an education. The suffrage, I maintain, is no education at all; it has no tendency whatever to make people wiser. Conferred on those who are entirely untutored, it can do nothing but develop and give substance to error and misconception. Ex stultis insanos facit. Education is no such easy popular process. It does not consist simply in drawing attention to a subject, but involves discipline, the detection of mistakes, continuous effort and personal responsibility on the part of the learner.

But it is not only in the newly enfranchised classes that this novel political tone may be observed. Almost as much metapolitics may now be detected in the political discussion of the middle classes. In the newest phase of fashion all political questions are despatched summarily alike in drawing rooms and at working-men's clubs by direct deduction from the vaguest general propositions, precisely as in the most primitive periods of science. Neither the working men nor those new-fledged politicians, the ladies,

and scarcely, it seems to me, universitybred men themselves, admit or conceive either that there is any difficulty in these questions or any great danger of misapprehending them, and still less that they absolutely require careful study. We have caught the tone of the Parisian salons of the last days of the old régime, when ladies and gentlemen settled, without the least misgiving, and without a suspicion that they might not have immediately at hand all the materials for forming a decision, the most momentous questions, when, as M. Taine says, "the questions of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul came in with the coffee!"

I confess I hardly understand what view is taken by those politicians who nowadays seem eager to put all the largest, most momentous, and most difficult questions before the people for an immediate decision. Do they suppose the people to be inspired? Or perhaps that they have a simple common sense which in the most intricate questions unerringly finds the right conclusion? This is almost the infatuation of Robespierre. It brings to mind his famous dictum, “Let us begin by laying it down that the people are good, but that its delegates are corruptible!"

I often think of a remark I once heard made by a working man at a club ; it rises to my mind whenever I want a measure of the competence of the great mass of working men to judge of large national questions. It was at an early stage of the great Eastern controversy, and he settled the question of our relations with Russia in this

way. "I do not know how you feel," he said, turning to the audience of working men, "and I do not know how it is, but whenever I hear the Russians mentioned, I feel the blood tingling all over me." He spoke as if he thought this instinctive feeling might be fairly taken as an intimation of the proper steps to be taken, and when I expressed alarm and horror at such a mode of handling the question, I thought I

could observe that many among the audience were surprised at the impression it had made on me. But I carried away a conception I never had before of the utter childishness with respect to great public matters not immediately affecting themselves in which vast multitudes of people live. It will be answered that the working classes respond with remarkable enthusiasm to any appeal made to their moral feelings. No doubt their minds are in a fallow state, and will yield any crop easily. That very man who could not bear to hear the Russians mentioned, has, I daresay, since given his voice just as eagerly in their favour. But there is little comfort in this reflexion. Without information, still more without a just way of conceiving political questions, they are just as likely to vote wrong when their good feelings are roused as when they are under the dominion of their animal instincts.

The notion seems widely spread that in politics good feelings and good intentions are the main thing, and almost the only thing, that if a people once has these, it will go right in the main, as if the difference between good politics and bad politics were, as Mr. Bright seems to hold, almost entirely moral and scarcely at all intellectual. And yet one of the principal lessons of recent history is the infinite deceivableness of the generous, impulsive, popular mind. No one questions the generous ardour of 1789, or that when the Revolution entered upon its career of unprincipled conquest, many Frenchmen really thought they were setting free and benefiting the countries they overran; no one doubts the sincerity of that worship of Napoleon to which Béranger gave expression. The people had good intentions, but Napoleon was clever enough to deceive them. And so when thirty years later universal suffrage was given to that nation, when for the first time the voice of the French people was really heard, it called Louis Napoleon to the head of affairs, and established a system of which we have seen the

results. These are instances of what I call somnambulism; they show the essential importance of a real knowledge of surrounding realities, of open eyes, and of a clear sight of the road along which the nation must walk, and the total insufficiency in politics of mere good intentions.

It is indeed hard, nay, impossible, for a whole people to have such real knowledge. The masses, as a matter of course, have not leisure to acquire even the information, and still less the just way of thinking, which are necessary for a sound political judgment. What they might in some degree acquire is, as I have said, the knowledge that there is such a knowledge, the distrust of their own instincts, of their higher as well as their lower instincts, the distrust of empty rhetoric, and the power of discerning in others that political judgment they can scarcely have themselves.

But perhaps some considerable time will yet pass before the working classes take full possession of their power. In the meanwhile everything still depends on the middle-class, in which are included most of the best educated men in the country. This class has hitherto shown prudence, and has even been renowned in the world for political sense and tact. But the conditions are greatly changed when Radicalism becomes for the first time triumphant, and takes up its position as, in some sort, the dominant practical creed. That this should happen at last was not at all surprising. In an age which has witnessed so much successful innovation, such a renewing of machinery in every department but politics, the hour was certain to arrive when people would think without too much anxiety of sending the old English constitution after the old stage-coach and the old "wooden walls." But the enterprise of renewing English institutions, though possibly feasible, is certainly serious and hazardous. It will tax political ability infinitely more than the modest task, to which we have hitherto confined ourselves, of altering

an old house where it seemed to need repair. That asks only good sense and good temper, but widely different qualities are needed by those who would handle fundamental questions. Hitherto we have held it unsafe even to open such questions, and surely it is unsafe unless we duly prepare ourselves to deal with them. A rough commonsense knowledge of politics might suffice for the old system, but Radicalism aims higher.

Radicalism as a domin

ant system, presumes the existence of a large class of people systematically trained in political science.

Has England this class? We seem to mistake the habit of busying ourselves with practical politics for a taste for political science. But it is surprising how little connexion there is between the two things, and what confused notions of politics many men have who pass their whole lives in practical political business. "We are not political philosophers," wrote Mr. Gladstone, not long ago. This is indeed a fact of which we often boast. In an age of Radicalism the boast cannot too soon become obsolete, for Radical politics are not safe except in the hands of political philosophers.

The truth is that, till quite lately, the highest education given in England left a man almost entirely without political instruction. It was much if the study of Thucydides or Aristotle's Politics imparted to him the knowledge that there was a higher and serener sort of political science than that expounded by Whig and Tory newspapers. We used to assert indeed that our classical system afforded an excellent introduction to political studies. This might be true, but it was an introduction which came too late. Thucydides and Aristotle might have done much if they had been closely followed by a host of modern writers on politics, and if the study of Athens and Rome had been followed by a study equally serious of modern England, France, and Germany. As it was, while a few men, who had exceptional opportunities, followed up

the hints their classical education had given them, and became instructed politicians, the great majority closed their political studies when they closed their Aristotle, and never afterwards succeeded in bringing together in their minds the chaos of English party politics and the few germs of political science which they had picked up at the university. Improvements have now been introduced, but it remains in the main true that the influence of science, of the school, is nil in English politics. What Englishmen know of politics, they have picked up in various ways, but there is one way in which they have not acquired it, they have not been taught it.

Now large changes must be made on large principles, and such large principles are the last thing which the English mind excogitates for itself. The helplessness of the general English intellect on this side has often been remarked. When it is in want of a principle, it snatches at any general proposition which sounds a little impressive, a little solemn, and applies it peremptorily with slight regard either to its truth or to its pertinence. It is all the more a slave to empty generalities when it listens to them at all, because it listens to them so seldom, and is so slow in originating them. The moment is very critical when such a nation as this enters for the first time on the path of speculative politics.

Radicalism considered as a ruling creed is too new among us to have been sufficiently criticised. It has risen to the head of affairs almost before people have done denying it to be serious. Now that the nation has suddenly adopted its fundamental principle there is some danger of its whole programme being accepted en bloc. But after having made good its case against the negative criticism of the ancient parties it ought to go before the discriminating criticism of science. Granted that our politics ought not to be bound eternally by precedent, granted that

there are principles in politics—still principles are of two kinds, true and false. Advanced thinkers may not be, as they used to be considered, necessarily unpractical, still the question remains whether they have been advancing in the right direction or in the wrong one. And when we consider how raw we are, as a nation, in political speculation, how capable in our innocence of adopting one after another all the false systems that ever were exploded, we ought surely to be much on our guard against the schemes of innovation that are now proposed to us as founded on philosophical principles, or as required by the spirit of the age. On such schemes scepticism has not yet done half its work. It remains to be decided whether those philosophical principles are more solid than a hundred metaphysical systems which have been forgotten after a brief day of popularity.

What criticism do we apply to these schemes? Are we satisfied with our system of a succession of popular party speeches followed by a general election? Do not those two miracles of popular will, the elections of 1874 and 1880, excite a certain misgiving in our minds? If indeed all political questions are level to the meanest capacity, if the plausible view in politics is always the true view, then our system leaves nothing to be desired. But if the obvious conclusion drawn from a small number of obvious facts is sometimes misleading, then nothing can be more futile than these great popular decisions, which never even profess to look below the surface. How would it fare with the best ascertained truths of science if they underwent such an ordeal? Many of these are flatly opposed to all ordinary or popular impressions, some of them actually to what is called the evidence of the senses. Imagine how the great voice of the people would pronounce on the question whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth! Imagine the contempt and ridicule and moral indignation which

would overwhelm the party which should maintain the true opinion! They would never hold up their heads again. It would be said that they had always secretly despised the people, that they had too long successfully hoodwinked them; but that now at length they had gone too far, now at last they had unmasked themselves, and for the future the nation would know what to think of them!

The unsoundness of some of the ideas which pass among us for advanced, may be illustrated by a conspicuous example, which it will be worth while to consider at some length.

It is easy to remark that men's views of politics vary with their views of history. We guide ourselves in the larger political questions by great historical precedents. In the last generation men were made Conservatives more by the single fact that the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror than by all the reasoning in the world. In these days men take up the cause of democracy not so much on abstract reasoning as because they think they see that democracy succeeds in America, or because France, in spite of her misfortunes, is still immensely rich and prosperous. Sometimes these historical arguments are quite far-fetched, and yet produce a great effect. What a multitude of educated men were led to democratic views by Mr. Grote's animated picture of the glories of the Athenian democracy! It must be confessed that it requires much research to form a trustworthy estimate of these great historical phenomena. But people think they are practically safe if they look only to broad historical results. They fancy that, though historians may differ about small details, the large outlines are clear of all doubt, and so the practical moral of history may be easily drawn. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more erroneous than this view. is the large outlines which are most easily falsified, and which party historians have most interest in falsifying. To falsify a fact is comparatively

It

difficult, but the meaning or character of a fact can easily be misstated. It costs a skilful party historian only the turn of a phrase, and the greatest event in the world-the Reformation or the Revolution-is turned upside down, and made to yield a lesson directly opposite to that which it really teaches.

Now the educated class in England does not study modern history. They will read it with pleasure-English history if it is at all attractively written, continental history if it is written very attractively. But they read it in the easy chair, and only care to remember what amuses them. And yet their political opinions are very materially influenced by this luxurious reading. Since Macaulay wrote, no opinion but his about the Revolution of 1688 has had any currency in England. Was this because he proved his points? Not at all. His partiality on many points was clearly perceived. It was in fact generally agreed that he was a party historian. But that made no difference.

His

views were universally adopted for the simple reason that his book was amusing, and that to test his statements in detail cost too much trouble. And there can be no doubt that this universal adoption of a particular view of that revolution produced the strongest effect upon the politics of the day.

Now it so happens that modern Radicalism has not yet written its history of England. If a great Radical writer of the calibre of Grote or Mill had gone over those critical events of English history upon our view of which our political opinions mainly depend, the revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the great war with revolutionary France, it is impossible to say what an effect might have been produced. But this was not done, and, in the absence of a Grote, modern Radicals seem in general to fall back upon Mr. Carlyle. In recent debates Radicalism seemed to be trying to express itself by praises of Cromwell in the tone of Mr. Carlyle, particuNo. 253.-VOL. XLIII.

larly-where the praise of Cromwell came in very strangely-in the attack on the proposed statue of the Prince Imperial. The author of Shooting Niagara is, to be sure, hardly a Radical, but in default of a better historical representative of their views, the party seem to make the best of Mr. Carlyle, as being at least neither Tory nor Whig.

Now the fact that the Radical party are inclined to adopt Cromwell for a hero is one which, as the French say, fait rêver. It shows how prone we are to assume that in politics all who think must be substantially agreed, and cannot differ among themselves, but differ only from those who from prejudice refuse to think. Only on this supposition could Mr. Carlyle be an oracle to the democratic party, when he has all along opposed democracy. According to him, nothing can be more false than to suppose that government can be well conducted by an assembly, nothing can be more contemptible than what is called the popular will, and even liberty itself is a chimera. According to him aristocracy, monarchy, and, in a sense, priesthood, are substantially good and necessary things, which need rather to be revived than to be abolished. The Radical party does not seem in the least inclined to listen to this teaching, which is indeed more opposed to their views than Toryism or Whiggism. Why, then, do they listen with favour to Mr. Carlyle's historical teaching? Assuredly the merit of Mr. Carlyle as a political preacher is far more unquestionable than his merit as a historian. And yet in most cases it will be found that the modern Radical adopts as a matter of course the Carlylian view of our civil wars, holding that the Restoration was a great calamity and an act of moral apostasy on the part of the nation, and that Cromwell was the inspired hero who, surpassing all the half-hearted Pyms and Hampdens of the Rebellion, showed England the true path she ought to have pursued. How can this

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