MONARCHY AND ITS DRAWBACKS. 545 



MONARCHY AND ITS DRAWBACKS. 



VERY nearly a century and a half ago David Hume observed, 

 with an air of surprise, that no form of government had proved 

 so susceptible of improvement as monai*chical government. " It may 

 now," he writes, " be affirmed of civilized monarchies what was for- 

 merly said of republics alone, that they are a government of laws, not 

 of men." There was only one constitutional monarchy in Hume's day 

 that of Great Britain, which he did not particularly love ; and the only 

 existing republics were strict aristocracies, such as the Venetian Re- 

 public and the Swiss Cantons. Hume was avowedly taking into ac- 

 count, not only such countries as France and Spain, but the little des- 

 potisms of Italy and Germany. " There are, perhaps, and have been 

 for two centuries, near two hundred absolute princes, great and small, 

 in Europe ; and, allowing twenty years to each reign, we may suppose 

 that there have been on the whole two thousand monarchs or tyrants, 

 as the Greeks would have called them ; yet of these there has not been 

 one, not even Philip II. of Spain, so bad as Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, 

 Domitian, who were four in twelve among the Roman Emperors." 

 Since then the world has seen two great examples of that republican 

 government which Hume assumes without question to be abstractedly 

 the best the Republic of the United States and the first French Re- 

 public ; and assuredly the result has been considerable disenchantment. 

 Nobody would nowadays deny that monarchy has proved capable of 

 yet greater improvement than even Hume thought possible ; and only 

 a small minority of men, and those certainly not consisting of deep 

 political thinkers, is persuaded that a country gains very much by ex- 

 changing an hereditary for an elective Chief Magistrate. 



But of course a monarchy implies a dynasty ; and dynasties are 

 always raising a number of questions so perplexing that they are a 

 considerable drawback on the value of monarchical government. In 

 the first place, there is no subject on which men as a fact have fought 

 and still fight so much. This country was for a hundred years at war 

 with France on a question of the kind ; and the war which it has just 

 successfully concluded with Afghanistan sprang in great part from the 

 same cause, since it was a doubt whether the Prince could nominate 

 his own successor which primarily threw Shere Ali into the arms of 

 the Russians. These questions of succession mix themselves up with 

 the entire politics of countries in which there is no open strife about 

 them. The position of the British monarchy and the view taken of 

 it are strongly influenced by the double fact that our line of kings 

 came in with a defective title, but that these defects have been prac- 

 tically removed by the course of circumstances and by time. The 

 relation, again, of the Count de Chambord to his far-away cousins of 

 vor.. xv. 35 



