736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The principle must not be a moral principle, because this would 

 imply an organized opposition to morality on the other side, and the 

 permanent existence of an immoral party ; two parties always in active 

 existence being plainly essential to the working of the system. You 

 cannot, for example, have a party of purity, because this would imply, 

 as its correlative and complement, a party of corruption, and it would 

 be a grotesque arrangement to devote half your citizens permanently 

 to the service and advocacy of corruption in order to maintain the 

 machinery of your government. 



The principle must be one of expediency. Parties, in other words, 

 must be divided by some question of policy, about which honest men 

 may differ. And it must be a question of sufficient magnitude to 

 transcend in importance all other questions; of sufficient importance 

 to warrant a man of sense and a good citizen in surrendering for its 

 sake his private judgment on all other political subjects to the guidance 

 of the party leader and the exigencies of the party struggle, and in 

 doing his utmost to exclude from the legislature and the public service 

 all men, however honest, however able, however useful in general re- 

 spects to the country, who do not agree with him on the vital point. 

 We need not use the invidious term proscription ; the thing will be the 

 same. 



Now, it is manifest, in the first place, that the occurrence of such 

 questions is exceptional, and not normal ; they can seldom arise in 

 fact except with reference to some organic change in the constitution, 

 such as the transfer of supreme power from the crown to Parliament, 

 or the change in the character of Parliament itself, embodied in the 

 English Reform Bill of 1832. American slavery was an issue of a 

 different kind and of still more transcendent importance; but it was 

 one lying quite beyond the pale of ordinary politics. In normal times 

 the occupations of legislatures and governments will be matters of 

 current administration, not one of which is likely to form an issue of 

 sufficient importance to swallow up all the rest and form a rational 

 ground for the division of the nation into two organized parties strug- 

 gling each to place its leaders in exclusive possession of the powers 

 of the state. 



In the second place, questions of expediency, however important, 

 do not last forever; in one way or other they are settled and disap- 

 pear from the political scene. Slavery dies and is buried. Parlia- 

 mentary reform is carried out with all its corollaries, and becomes a 

 thing of the past. What is to follow ? Another question of sufficient 

 importance to warrant a division of the nation into parties must be 

 found. But suppose no such question exists, are we to manufacture 

 one ? That is the work to which tlie wire-pullers devote themselves 

 in democracies governed by party, but the results seem hardly to cor- 

 respond to our notion of the adamantine basis on whicli the political 

 edifice is to rest forever. 



