The

of the House of Commons; but when the House of Commons got to actual work it was at once seen that parties were divided upon differences not only "important," but "fundamental." issues actually raised by the Cabinet have included the abolition of the House of Lords, the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church, and the repeal of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. Evidently then, the working of the Party system has brought us within view of "vital matters," which are "admitted to be revolutionary," and which, if carried to a conclusion in the manner desired by the most powerful portion of the Radical Party, must involve the disappearance of the Constitution itself.

If we try to realise the extent to which the character of the English Constitution has changed since the time of Bagehot, and to describe the nature of the change in the common-sense untechnical language he was accustomed to use, it seems to me that we arrive at a result something like this. We are no doubt a self-governing nation, in the sense that power ultimately lies with the great body of the people. But then, as Bagehot puts it,

The most intellectual men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null. We could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to do. We should accomplish nothing, for all our energies would be frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement. One man, too, would go off from the known track in one direction, and one in another; so that when a crisis came requiring massed combination, no two men would be near enough to act together. It is the dull traditional habit of mankind that guides most men's actions, and is the steady frame in which each new artist must set the picture that he paints.*

Here we have a description of the perhaps permanent order of human nature, and certainly of English nature to-day. The great body of the people in politics, as in everything else where personal interests are not immediately concerned, are spectators rather than actors. They are fascinated with the picture of human action, as it is presented to them every morning in their halfpenny newspapers. As regards the management of their own political affairs, their attitude is accurately typified by that of English Constitution (1904), p. 9.

*

the enormous crowds that attend matches at cricket or football. These support the game with their gate-money, and a very large number of them have a stake in the issue of the game through their bets; but they take no active part in it. So the actual self-government of the English people in home, foreign, and imperial politics is restricted to a kind of dreamy, epicurean, contemplation; while they delegate all active intervention in the same to their representative, the Cabinet of the moment.

66

Now

in Bagehot's time the Cabinet stood for what he calls the dignified parts" of the Constitution, in other words its aristocratic conditions; but in our time, as Mr. Lowell shows, it stands for the democratic machinery evolved, out of the Party system, to suit the needs of those who are engaged in professional politics. When public opinion has exercised its single function of handing over the government at a General Election to one party or the other, its control of the action of the resulting Cabinet, so long as the Parliamentary majority supporting the Cabinet can hold together, amounts to almost nothing. It is quite possible, therefore, that, for a considerable term of years, under the Party system, a nation may be governed in a way contrary to its own desires, the only remedy lying in a reversal of legislation when the people has once more had an opportunity of declaring its mind after another General Election.

Did this mode of government affect simply the internal arrangements of society, it might be endured. Gross injustice to classes and individuals would doubtless result from it, but this would have been the fault of the laziness and apathy of the nation itself, which would have to admit that

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Do make us plagues to scourge us.

But England, as a self-governing nation, has other things to regulate besides its home business. It has to take part in the councils of Europe, dealing with affairs of essential importance both to its own position as a Great Power and to the independence of smaller nations which it is pledged by treaty to protect; and it is responsible for the good government of India, and in a minor degree of Egypt, besides having the ultimate voice in treaties vital to the fortunes of the great Colonial Dominions of the Crown.

All these matters again involve considerations relating to the very safety and prosperity of the nation itself; yet all of them are in the control of a Cabinet whose existence depends on the observance of the most rigid rules of Party discipline. We have but to reflect for a moment on the state of the ruling Party, and we shall see that the Cabinet is divided against itself on such a first principle of national existence as the expenditure required for the supremacy of the Navy, and that its necessary freedom of Imperial action is hampered by the meddlesome attempts of many of its supporters to interfere in the House of Commons with those who are immediately responsible for the government of India. I think it must be clear to most reflecting minds that a political system which, in the natural course of evolution, has been brought to a point where parties are divided upon differences in home affairs not only "important" but "fundamental,” is à fortiori ill qualified to deal with problems in which errors of opinion must prove fatal to the preservation of Empire.

These considerations are sufficient to undermine, as I have said, the optimism of those who think with Mr. Lowell that the life of the English Constitution is bound up with Party government. I subscribe to all that Mr. Dicey has so well said concerning the evils produced by the working of the system as it actually exists, and above all to his conclusion that "political art will never be able to transform party conflicts, however subtly conducted, into a device for making partisanship perform the functions of patriotism." History furnishes a striking example of the truth of his reflections. There was a time when ancient Athens reached a point of social development at which individual ease and enjoyment seemed the most precious of earthly possessions. Political conflict became to her one of her merely intellectual pleasures. There was nothing that her citizens enjoyed more than to listen to a good oratorical set-to in the Ecclesia between the peace-at-anyprice party of the aristocratic Eubulus and the party of the "jingo" rhetoricians who did the business for the opposite side. A decree of the people, after all parties had finished their talk, disposed of the matter immediately in hand, and there was no necessity of thinking for the future. Politics were, in fact, on the same level of reality in the minds of the citizens as their religious "pageants," their discussions about abstruse points of meta

physics, the æsthetic squabbles between their Realists and Impressionists (who were doubtless active, though we do not hear of them), and the chances of their representatives at the Olympic Games; but when any question arose as to undergoing personal military service, or bearing the burden of taxation for the defence of their Empire, the Athenians had no ear for such far-off possibilities. Meantime the King of Macedon was drilling his army, and one day, while they were being amused in the Ecclesia, the Athenians learned that he was interesting himself in a little interHellenic religious difficulty about the Oracle of Delphi, which would require his presence, at the head of his troops, in the Pass of Thermopyla. A few years afterwards they were fighting for and losing their individual liberties at the battle of Charonea. Is it not equally possible that, while our Cabinet are considering how many "Dreadnoughts" they can build, without actually losing the votes at the command of Sir John Brunner and Mr. Keir Hardie, some small international complication, involving the question, “What is the German Fatherland?" may arise, which will cause the appearance of a German army and a German fleet in all the ports of Belgium and Holland?

Then comes the question: Are Mr. Dicey's pessimistic conclusions inevitable? If we hold (as Mr. Dicey in all the earlier part of his article seems to hold) with Mr. Lowell, that the English Constitution "is based upon party, and by the law of its nature tends to accentuate party," I do not see what other result we can arrive at. But the Conservative Party is by no means bound by its principles to accept this view of the Constitution. Perhaps I may be allowed, without incurring the charge of egotism, to illustrate this point by opinions expressed anonymously nearly thirty years ago. In an article in the Quarterly Review, for October 1881, on "The Past and Future of the Conservative Party," the present writer was permitted to employ the high authority of that organ with the leaders of his Party to urge, in the face of their recent defeat, the necessity of placing before the constituencies a definite and progressive Conservative policy. The article said: "The only course which, in our opinion, is worthy of Conservative statesmen, and of the party which Lord Beaconsfield led, is to proclaim the outlines of a constructive policy, and to defend it boldly before the people." This would in fact

have done what Bagehot said English statesmen ought to do, but what, since the first Reform Bill, Parliamentary leaders have almost always shrunk from doing. And on this principle the article traversed the entire view of the English Constitution, as now elaborated in Mr. Lowell's treatise and embodied in the Liberal idea of Cabinet government, till it arrived finally at this conclusion:

The nation is halting between two courses. One of these will lead to the expansion of society by the consolidation of the Empire; the other must end in the disintegration of the Empire through a war of classes. The Revolutionary Party have already beckoned the English people one step along the road that leads to the dissolution of society, while the rapid spread of communistic principles to Scotland, and even to England, and the readiness with which such principles are defended for party purposes by the Liberal press, show that the nation may be committed, in a moment of delusion, to a line of policy from which it will be impossible to retreat. At such a crisis is it well for the Conservative chiefs to keep silence? They have fought a good fight in the defensive position marked out for them by Peel since 1832, and have helped to make the transition from the old aristocratic régime to our own more popular form of government gradual and secure. But the existing situation is one that demands the genius not of a Peel, but of a Pitt or a Cecil. The aristocracy of England have no longer a monopoly of Parliamentary Government; the State has withdrawn its protection from their agriculture; but they are still the most powerful and popular leaders of society, because their countrymen understand that they have never subordinated the interests of the nation to those of their own order.*

The gist of the policy recommended was that the Conservatives, in a policy tending to Imperial Federation, should revive the patriotic spirit of the legislation initiated by Pitt, Canning, and Huskisson, as opposed to the line of mere commercial individualism, adhered to more or less by both parties since the victory of Cobden's Free Trade principles. That recommendation was not acted upon by the Conservative leaders. Two things interfered with its adoption. One was the development of the purely Party machinery of the English Constitution in the hands of Mr. Gladstone, which led him inevitably to the policy of Home Rule for Ireland, and rendered necessary to the Conservatives the continuation, on more extended lines, of the exclusively defensive policy recommended by the great authority of Peel. But, after the second defeat of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule scheme in 1895, another opportunity of constructive statesmanship offered itself Quarterly Review, October 1881.