302 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



have worked well, and an encouragement to go 

 further and at once in the same direction ? Cer- 

 tainly his latest writings do not indicate that such 

 are the final convictions of the experienced poli- 

 tician, who must be anxious to take the most 

 favorable view he can. On the contrary, in many- 

 passages he holds, and I think justly, language 

 of disappointment, discouragement, and sadness 

 — though as yet not of repentance — at his own 

 share in the work. And, curiously enough, Mr. 

 Lowe, dissenting from him in most points, and 

 most of all in (one, coincides with him here, and 

 uses phraseology almost identical. 



What the general public observes in looking 

 at the representative assembly which we owe to 

 the latest reform act and the widened electorate 

 is probably this : that the popular judgment, 

 which Mr. Gladstone regards as nearly always 

 right, has replaced the most conspicuously pacific 

 minister of our times by the most apparently war- 

 like and Chauvinistic, and a premier specially 

 and, as many fear, dangerously liberal, for a rival 

 whose most rooted notions (as far as it is possible 

 to gather them from the aggregate of his utter- 

 ances) tend, like those of his great imperial pro- 

 totype, toward personal government and the in- 

 crease of the power of the crown resting on a 

 democratic basis ; that this same popular judg- 

 ment (so instinctively sound, we are assured) has 

 given to the chief it has enthroned a working 

 majority of about one hundred, which, added to 

 his own singular genius for swaying the wills and 

 views of all who come under his influence, prom- 

 ises to render him nearly irresistible ; that, ex- 

 pressing itself so largely through the publican 

 element in the constituencies, that element — by 

 no means the noblest — has naturally been largely 

 considered by the Government which owed to it 

 so much ; and that the budgets of the cabinet 

 thus chosen bear traces only too manifest of a 

 disposition to pander to the interests and the er- 

 rors of the lower portion of its supporters — in 

 fine, that neither the financial nor the foreign 

 policy of the House of Commons elected by far 

 the most numerous constituency yet known is 

 such as we can consider either creditable, wise, 

 or safe ; and that neither in courtesy, dignity, nor 

 decorum have its manners been worthy of the 

 past or models for the future. 



What Mr. Gladstone condemns and dreads in 

 the House of Commons he states candidly and 

 with force, though as yet he entirely declines "to 

 ascribe them to the extension of the suffrage." 

 But— 



" the evils of our parliamentary system I regard as 



great and growing. . . . The longer I live the less 

 do I see in the public institutions of any country 

 even a tendency to approximate to an ideal stand- 

 ard." 



Yet every year, and everywhere, do they become 

 more democratic. 



" Turning to our own, amid all our vaunted 

 and all our real improvements, I see in some very 

 important respects a sad tendency to decline. It 

 seems to me that, as a whole, our level of public 

 principle and public action was at its zenith in the 

 twenty years or thereabout which succeeded the 

 Reform Act of 1832, and that it has since percep- 

 tibly gone down. I agree with Mr. Lowe that we 

 are in danger of engendering both a gerontocracy 

 and a ploutocracy. . . . The two circumstances 

 which strike me most forcibly and most painfully 

 are — 1. The rapid and constant advance of the 

 money-power; 2. The reduction almost to zero 

 of the chances of entrance into Parliament for men 

 who have nothing to rely upon but their talents 

 and their character — nothing, that is to say, but 

 the two qualities which certainly stand before all 

 others in the capacity of rendering service to the 

 country." 



The place of the young and highly-trained whose 

 absence he deplores has, Mr. Gladstone says — 



" been taken mainly by men who have been rec- 

 ommended to their constituents by the possession 

 of money. . . . The loss has been among those 

 who had the very best capacity to serve the coun- 

 try. The gain has accrued to those whose main 

 object is to serve themselves. I do not mean in a 

 corrupt sense. It is to serve themselves by social 

 advancement. The total exclusion of such men is 

 probably not to be desired, but their swollen and 

 swelling numbers are a national calamity. It is a 

 calamity with a double edge." 



The excluded, Mr. Gladstone says, are driven 

 mainly to the press, which affords them a very 

 much less valuable education. 



" It gives them a laborious training in irrespon- 

 sible, anonymous, pungent criticism, in lieu of the 

 manly and noble discipline which a youth spent in 

 Parliament imparts. In the light of day, under 

 the eye and judgment of the best, at once stimu- 

 lated and restrained, at once encouraged and 

 abashed, our youth had everything to sustain a 

 high sense of political warfare, to develop the bet- 

 ter parts of a knightly nature, to rebuke the sordid 

 and the "base. Invert all these expressions, and 

 we attain a tolerably accurate description of the 

 kind of education which our modern arrangements 

 have provided for the most ready, brilliant, and 

 serviceable of the young men of England in lieu 

 of a seat in Parliament. These are not pleasant 



