418 COMPARATIVE LAW 



constitutional amendments, in the very face, as it looks, of an ex- 

 press provision of the Federal Constitution. 



Yet everywhere public opinion shows a wonderful leniency toward 

 the politicians who manipulate the polls and falsify the results, 

 before or after the contest. Most of the frauds are well known; the 

 statutes hurl all sorts of punishments on the culprits, but very 

 often they go scot free; sometimes even their devices receive the 

 official indorsement of the unprincipled majority which has profited 

 by them. Happy indeed are the countries where governmental 

 pressure and administrative corruption are not yet allowed to exist 

 upon those evils! What does that show? 



It shows that, even when the law of the land most emphatically 

 asserts the absolute equivalence of all citizens in politics, public 

 opinion, on the contrary, instinctively feels, although it is sometimes 

 loath to own it, that such a theory is utterly false, that it has no 

 practical foundation, and that its literal application, far from being 

 in any way desirable, would probably be most dangerous for the 

 political balance of the country. Public opinion, passionately attached 

 to political equality, because it mistakes it for a necessary conse- 

 quence of individual liberty, has a clear sense, however, of its perils, 

 and it tolerates, like necessary evils, the more or less clever devices, 

 the more or less unfair tricks which may, to a certain extent, insure 

 the general interest which such a theory must inevitably jeopardize. 



However, there is one country which, on the occasion of her 

 political reforms, has plainly sanctioned in her electoral legislation 

 this evident truth; namely, that all men do not possess the same 

 value from the political point of view. 



That country is Belgium. And if I take it as my subject before 

 this meeting, it is not merely out of patriotic pride, a feeling 

 which would hardly deserve the consideration of an assembly of 

 learned scientists, but it is because of the unique scientific interest 

 which attaches itself to the political experiments which Belgium 

 has just made within the last ten years, in the vanguard, I might 

 say, of the peoples who have adopted the parliamentary system. 



' Belgium was the first country to attempt on a large scale reforms 

 which had long been recommended by the masters of political 

 science, and she accomplished them at a time when most of the 

 statesmen, some even in Belgium, branded them as practically 

 impossible and treated them as the pious dreams of mere theoretical 

 scientists. Practical politicians will kindly allow me to remind this 

 audience that the authors of those daring and successful reforms 

 both belonged to an academical faculty. 1 



1 The late Professor Alb. Nyssens, Member of Parliament and Minister of 

 Labor, and Professor Jules van den Heuvel, Minister of Justice, both eminent 

 members of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lou vain. 



