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WITH regard to all subjects of dis

cussion but one, we deem it wise and right to be openminded and dispassionate. That one subject is the government of nations.

Recent events in England have specially directed attention not only to the Irish question or that of the House of Lords, but to the party system of government. In the Irish trouble the country never would have been involved had not the division of Parliament into two hostile parties, and a party leader's desire to force his way back to power, enabled Parnell, with his Irish section, by playing on the balance of parties to bring the United Kingdom to the verge of dissolution. Nothing surely but blind devotion to party could have induced all those British members of Parliament to vote for a bill giving Ireland a Parliament of her own and at the same time a representation in the Parliament of Great Britain, which would have been constantly used in an interest virtually foreign to extort concession from the parties there.

No. 4

Lord Randolph Churchill was a perfect master of the party system, to which he owed his own extraordinary rise to prominence and power. In his "Life" by his son we read the following:

Some of Lord Randolph's maxims in Opposition are well known. He is often credited with, though he cannot rightly claim, the authorship of the phrase, "The duty of an Opposition is to oppose." Lord Salisbury condemned early in 1883 "the temptation, strong to many politicians, to attempt to gain the victory by bringing into the Lobby men whose principles were divergent, and whose combined forces therefore could not lead to any wholesome victory." "Excellent moralising," observed Lord Randolph, "very suitable to the digestions of country delegates, but one of those Puritanical theories which party leaders are prone to preach on a platform, which has never guided for any length of time the actions of politicians in the House of Commons, and which, whenever apparently put into practice, invariably results in weak and inane proceedings. Discriminations between wholesome and unwholesome victories are idle and impracticable. Obtain the victory, know how to follow it up, and leave the wholesomeness or unwholesome

ness to critics." His second maxim was as follows: 'Take office only when it suits you, but put the Government in a minority whenever you decently can'; and his third: 'Whenever by an unfortunate concurrence of circumstances an Opposition is compelled to support the Government, the support should be given with a kick, and not with a caress, and should be withdrawn on the first available moment.*

Go into any one of the Assemblies which are called deliberative; how much deliberation will you find? What will you find but volleys of argument or declamation interchanged between the opposite benches without the slightest thought or hope of producing conviction? The press is enslaved by the same influences, on which its organs depend for circulation, though it fondly flatters itself that it is free.

Burke's apologetic definition of party is well known, and is always quoted in defence of the system. "Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed." The oracle does not tell us how a principle of sufficient importance to unite half the nation and warrant its antagonism to the other half is always to be found, and how, when the question has been settled, as all questions of policy must sooner or later be, its place can be filled so as to make the combination still rational and moral; or if the party is disbanded, how a new party is to be formed, and party-government carried on.

Burke's political philosophy seems in this, as in some other cases, to have been in some degree inspired by the occasion. When, by the defeat of the last Pretender, the conflict between the Hanoverian adherents of constitutional government and the Stuart adherents of monarchical government had been brought to a close, parties, having no longer distinctive principles, broke up into cliques or connections, each with some magnate at its head, caballing and conspiring against each other for power. An era of intrigue and corruption very dangerous to national

character and interests ensued.

To this

Chatham strove to put an end in the obvious way, by the formation of a national government. But Burke, a follower

*Life I, 233

of Rockingham, wanted the Rockingham connection, "party" as he called it, to be in power. Later on, upon the eve of the rupture with France, the apologist of party himself left his party, broke openly with its leader, and assailed its policy with violence, almost with frenzy, in his Essay on the French Revolution.

People sometimes talk as though there were no practicable or even conceivable system of government but party. They are like the British footman who thought blue absurd as a uniform except for the artillery or the Horse Guards Blue. There were governments in England before there were party cabinets; that of Edward I for example, and that of Burleigh and Walsingham, under the name of Elizabeth, which carried the country safe through the terrible crisis of the Reformation and the war with the Catholic powers. There was a government, very short-lived, but great in performance while it lasted, that of the Protectorate; wrecked by storms and adverse accidents, the death of the Protector, and the turbulence of the army chiefs, almost in port; yet great while it lasted. The "Instrument of Government,” which will be found in Whitelock's Memorials, deserves study, for its principles apart from its details. It is the work of profound politicians and men who, although they had taken arms against autocratic and sacerdotal reaction, were not revolutionary in temperament but the reverse. It will be found on inspection to be a notable effort to combine the stability and impartiality of government, to which party is adverse, with the recognition of the elective principle and the due influence of public opinion.

In England party government had its temporary justification. William III tried hard to govern impartially with a coalition cabinet. But the Jacobites were in correspondence with St. Germain's, and he very reluctantly formed an exclusive cabinet of the Whigs. The necessity of excluding Jacobites, or Tories as they were thenceforth called, from the government continued till after Culloden.

There must be only two parties, otherwise government breaks down, and there ensues a chaotic conflict of sections, such