THE DECLINE OF FAETY GOVERNMENT. 739 



In the same way it has been assumed that the English system of 

 party and of cabinets, which are'committees of party, is the vital prin- 

 ciple of constitutional government. But party in England has been 

 the instrument, probably the indispensable instrument, of a chronic 

 revolution. By the action of the party wliich in its successive phases 

 has borne the names of Puritan, Whig, and Liberal, the Tudor autoc- 

 racy has been reduced to a limited, or rather a faineant, monarchy, and 

 the Tory oligarchy, once intrenched in the rotten boroughs, has been 

 replaced by a House of Commons elected on a more popular basis ; 

 supreme power, in other words, has been gradually transferred from 

 the crown and the aristocracy to the representatives of the people. 

 All this time there has been a real ground of division and a question 

 of importance supreme enough to warrant allegiance to a party. But 

 the process is now nearly complete. Other questions, of which the 

 name Radical is the symbol, will probably emerge, and may again 

 furnish grounds for the action of party. As it is, the lines between 

 the aristocratic and democratic parties remain, though their outline 

 is confused, and the democratic party is paralyzed for the time by the 

 Conservative reaction, caused mainly by a vast influx of wealth. But 

 we have an inkling at all events in the present state of things, even 

 in England, of the time when the materials for party will be finally 

 exhausted, and when we shall be obliged perforce to look out for some 

 other mode of working constitutional government. Bayonets have 

 their uses, but you cannot sit on them. Party has its use as the organ 

 of a pacific revolution ; but it will not supply the permanent basis of 

 a national government. 



Even in the course of the revolution, efiected by means of party 

 in England, as often as the movement has been temporarily suspended 

 by accident or lassitude, the weakness of the system has appeared. 

 Between the fall of Jacobitism and the advent of the French Revolu- 

 tion, when there was no great party question on foot, but the offices 

 of state were still put up as the prizes of success in the struggle of 

 parliamentary factions, you had half a century of chaotic intrigue and 

 corruption, broken only by the short dictatorship of Chatham, whose 

 own conduct, in the cabals which drove Walpole into the war with 

 Spain, was an example, if not of place-hunting, of place-storming, of 

 the most flagrant kind. The boasted efficienc)^ of party, as a detector 

 and exposer of abuses, was then proved to be little sustained by facts; 

 it was seen, neither for the first nor for the last time, that two factions, 

 whatever their mutual hatred, may virtually combine to preserve a 

 privilege of plundering the community, which each hopes to exercise 

 in its turn. 



Not only is the usefulness of party as a political instrument close- 

 ly connected with the peculiar circumstances of English history ; it is 

 closely connected also with the peculiar circumstances of an age of 

 unscientific politics, of combinations formed upon class interests, of 



