Chapter XIII: Front Matter (13)

'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 Regime_ 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 Vendee. 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, _corvees_, 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 Vendeans.

And yet that massacre is in itself suggestive. The wholesale butcheries of the Terror are accountable; even the attempt of Robespierre, St. Just, and Barere 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 _buerger_, 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, _buerger_ 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 _buerger_ 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 Caesarism 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.

_'"Egalite,"_ 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, _egalite_--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 _proletariat_ 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 _regne 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 _proletariat_ 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 20_s_ 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.

ART. X.--1. _Fourth Midlothian Campaign._ Political speeches delivered, November, 1885, by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. Edinburgh, 1886.

2. John Morley: _The Irish Record of the New Chief Secretary, 1886._

3. _Ireland; A Book of Light on the Irish Problem._ Edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1886.

4. _Home Rule._ Reprint from the 'Times' correspondence, &c. 1886.

5. _Social Order in Ireland. Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union._ Dublin, 1886.

6. _Speech of Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 8, 1886, on moving for leave to bring in a Bill to make provision for the future Government of Ireland._

The fate of the scheme for the Government of Ireland, which Mr. Gladstone disclosed in the House of Commons last week, has been practically determined. Whether the Bill be rejected on the second reading, whether amidst the currents of adverse opinion which have already set in, it slowly goes to wreck upon the shoals of Parliamentary procedure, its ultimate doom is already settled, but the mischief which has been done will not be removed so promptly. A great blow has been struck at the United Kingdom. The proposal to recognize Irish nationality as a political force apart from Great Britain--a proposal made by a Prime Minister, a leader of a great Parliamentary party--will for many a day to come stimulate in Ireland all the elements of disorder, which a noble series of statesmen, from Burke to Peel, have resolutely laboured to eradicate.

It was no surprise to the House that had listened to the marvellous dream of Mr. Gladstone, when Mr. Parnell rose to express his gratitude in terms almost of emotion:--

'It will prove a happy and fortunate thing, both for Ireland
and England, that there was one man living, one English
statesman living, with the great power and the extraordinary
ability of the right hon. gentleman to lend his voice on
behalf of poor helpless Ireland. He had devoted his great
mind, his extraordinary energy to the unravelling of this
question and to the construction of this Bill.... To none of
the sons of Ireland--at any time has there ever been given
the genius and talent of the right hon. gentleman--certainly
nothing approaching to it in these days.'

The people, whom a few months ago Mr. Parnell denounced as representing to him and his friends 'imprisonment, chains and death,' now came to offer him a scheme of Irish nationality, and Shylock, recognizing the wisdom of the sham Balthazar, was not more appreciative: 'A Daniel come to judgment, yea a Daniel,' but, like Shylock, Mr. Parnell relied upon his bond. Whilst he accepted the offering with the effusion of a successful speculator, he took care to remind his hearers that he was not bound to take it in discharge of his claim. He reserved any 'definite or positive expression of opinion;' 'there were undoubtedly great faults and blots in the measure,' but he could safely say, 'whavever might be the fate of the Bill, the cause of Ireland, the cause of Irish autonomy, will enormously gain by the genius of the right hon. gentleman.' This is the solid result of the strange events which have been passing for the last three months. A distinguished public man has been called to office by the Parnellite vote. He has demanded and obtained ample time to consider the difficulties of his position and offer his solution.

A glance at the new scheme shows that the proposal is at once disingenuous and fantastic. The Prime Minister shrinks from admitting the nature of the work he is engaged in. He breaks up the unity of the Kingdom, but he will not allow that his Bill involves the repeal of the Union. But whatever quibbles may be indulged in, the main principle of the Act of Union, that Ireland should be represented at Westminster is swept away. As Irish nationality is not to be ignored, it finds expression in a Parliament in Dublin; but Ireland is to pay a contribution towards the debt and towards public defence, and in the application of this money is to have no voice. Thus we have Irish nationality started with machinery which sets aside the first principle of free governments, that there should be no taxation without representation; and the internal arrangements of the Dublin Parliament are equally suggestive of confusion in the future.