sity of accepting ideals to which they are antagonistic. Unless the standing differences between the two great parties are unimportant, we must expect that the concessions made to each other by Progressives and Conservatives, when there is a coalition, must be so difficult that only a great point of conscience or doctrine could persuade to them. Whether the point is sufficiently important is what the Mr. Burke, or the Duke of Devonshire of the time, and all who think with him, has to consider. That it was so in the case of Peel and the Corn Laws and was not so in the case of Mr. Burke and the French Revolution I am well persuaded. Of the situation now existing it does not beseem me here to speak. I agree that I cannot propose a better rule than Professor MacCunn lays down; but with what doubt and anxiety must a politician watch the bias of his own almost compelled steps, and the pulsations of his own sympathies, on a path divergent from his old aspirations and under the marching-orders of voices to which he never expected to

listen.

Perhaps it is a happiness to hope that such conditions are transitionary. In parties "Nature's copy is not eterne." When there has been secession there is little coming back, but there is much modification. Even if numbers and balance and mutual relations change, political philosophy, until our system completely changes, is likely to have to consider in Great Britain the action of the two great solid parties, however incongruously they may have been composed. Professor MacCunn's observations on party in this normal condition are as just as they are favourable. Party secures practicality, he says.

Loyalty to party goes far to guarantee adaptability to circumstances. It is just here," he truly adds, "that adherence to party is so markedly superior to adherence to

formula. A party is alive. It moves with the times, and even its most retrograde adherents are constrained imperceptibly to move with it. Even more important is the advantage that a party offers so large an object for allegiance. A great party is not a curiosity shop in which customers can each simply find his own particular fancy in measures. It unites men on grounds of principle and of general policy that admit of many a varied application. If it makes demands upon its members and exacts from them much self-suppression, it offers none the less a comprehensive creed in which some of the most vigorous minds have for a life-time found room enough and to spare. And who can deny that the public life of many a citizen, otherwise narrow, desultory, and incoherent in its aims and interest, has gained in breadth and in consistency, because it has been caught up into the larger life of party, which is, after all, much wider and fuller than even the aspirations of the vast majority of its members. It is an even greater gain that adherence to a party is so admirably fitted to secure a consistency, a continuity in thought and in action, of which individuals are often quite incapable. Even the strongest of men have learnt the lesson that, if they try to stand alone, their convictions wax and wane. They are at the mercy of doubts, despondencies, apathies. What they need is some support, impersonal enough to remain untouched by the accidents and impulses of the veering individual life. And they find this in a party, especially if it is a party with old traditions and far-reaching hopes. Once adopted by a party, a principle or a policy gains a weight and a stability which it cannot have when held, however strongly, by individual minds alone. A party is no compact made for temporary issues. It rests on more than a mere agreement of opinion and interest upon even a permanent policy. It is

also an association of men, disciplined and welded together by what Burke called 'hard essays of practised friendship and experimented fidelity.' This may have its drawbacks. But the gain is that it is just in this instinct and habit of loyalty that there lies a safeguard against the precipitancy, the crudity, the instability, the misgivings, which are so apt to waylay even the most self-confident of men, when in their decisions they have no one to think of but themselves."

These are most welcome and memorable expressions, such as it is both delightful and useful to have from the pen of a distinguished thinker-out and illustrator of doctrine in terms of ethical seriousness. They deserve not only to live in recorded authority, but to be incorporated in the lives of citizens, for I believe, and I hope that Professor MacCunn concurs, that membership of a party is a downright duty from which citizens can only be excused before man and God by congenital imbecility.

The point is perhaps scarcely worth making, and it is certainly not worth illustrating, but I have a feeling that Mr. MacCunn is not quite equal in the tone of his canons. Many of them he lays down like these on Party upon grounds of reason and ethics, but occasionally he attaches too much importance as an ethical principal to conformity to human nature. Now, human nature is all very well, and politics which had no regard to human nature might as well-to use a vulgar expression-put up the shutters. But human nature wants a great deal of correcting and keeping in order and bringing up to a higher standard, and happily the only methods which are of good credit in free, organised democratic politics are such as naturally tend to make human nature in the mass distinctly better than it is in the individual. One of these is public eloquence, which cannot be too much encouraged, because

the better it is, I will even say the more ambitious it is, is the more likely to raise the people to a high level of spirit and conscience in public affairs. I once had the privilege of telling Mr. Bright a story about himself. Though extremely positive, and even self-satisfied as to his opinions and his line of conduct, he had a tinge of pessimism in him which made him misdoubt, or affect to misdoubt, the effect of his own speeches. I told him of a scene in a London restaurant. Two very ordinary business men were sitting opposite each other at luncheon, reading the while, as is the way with Londoners. "What a splendid speech this is of John Bright's," said one to the other. "Oh! I never read all that rubbish," was the reply. "Now come," said the first speaker, "just read this bit that I'll show you," and he handed the paper over to his acquaintance. It was a passage, I remember, in which some fine ideal of State amelioration was brought home to the emotions by some poignant representation of woes or evils as they were. When next the man who lent the newspaper looked up from his plate the man to whom he had lent it was in tears.

In the shrewd and persuasive passage of Cicero's oration for Lucius Murena, in which he insinuatingly pleads, with human nature on his side, for mitigations of that Stoic code which he admits Marcus Cato not only believed in but acted on, he wisely says that all virtues should be tempered by moderation. Nothing more serious requires the attention of our very best statesmen, because in proportion as they are high-minded and public of spirit, and have lofty aims, they are apt to forget how stolid and low in conceptions human nature in general is. But, as it is part of the business of high statesmanship to hit the happy mean to which average human nature may be induced by teaching and oratory

and insensible habit to rise, and to which practical statesmanship may, without compromise of principle, descend, so it is part of the business of political philosophy, while recognising human nature as necessary to be taken into account in affairs, to reject utterly the foibles of human nature as in any way a standard of public right and policy. For instance, it is human nature to aggrandise one's country, but that does not excuse unjust aggression. On the other hand, the fact that encroachments will be led up to by trade, which is good, and by greed, which is bad, and by love of enterprise, which is neutral, is constantly creating for a great country situations in which it has to be decided whether duty lies in accepting or in rejecting acquisitions of territory. So, again, human nature loves military display and naval strength, but it must be settled by policy and ethics, not by human nature, how far naval and military armaments are to be carried, and what is to be done with them. Similarly it is human nature to hate paying rates, but the impatience of ratepaying must be limited to a minimum effect on the ordering of public expenditure; and, while it is trying to human nature to witness destitution, the giving of relief and the provision of employment must be regulated only partially by feelings of compassion. Sheer patriotism, as it may be called-sheer patriotism in ourselves, spread-eagleism and Chauvinism in our neighbours— is one of the most seductive of human nature's wiles for the citizen. It was said by Guizot, of Berryer, that he always remained popular because he was always patriotic. It may be said with equal truth that there is no country whose patriotism, so called, has not at times made it justly ridiculous to all the rest of the world. These and almost all public subjects must be more or less complicated as they appeal to the judgment. The worst possible