but the victor on each occasion had perpetually to keep his senses alive to the movements of his half-scotched antagonist. The Romish Church was perpetually scheming to regain its lost power: hence the rallying cry for the people became the Protestant cause, in the same way as later on the Parliamentary war-cry against the Crown was encroachment of the prerogative, or selecting a ministry against the will of the people. Thus things went on comfortably for the upper class during the whole of the eighteenth century, which was to them what the Elizabethan era was to the power of the Crown. Both parties at these respective periods reached their apogee. Each have receded since in their respective ratios.

A new power has come upon the field. The people wish to manage their affairs for themselves. Formerly the Crown, tempered or controlled by a nobility, exercised absolute power; next the nobility, controlled by the middle classes, governed as an oligarchy; lastly the people wished to govern. Mark however the change. The nobility which during the last century was hostile to the independent exercise of the prerogative, although it constituted itself its greatest defender in the Constitution, has now, since the great Reform Bill which sealed the fate of the paramount power of this class, become the] staunchest ally of the Crown in maintaining its rights and privileges before the rising power of popular ministries which represent specially the power of [the people. The influence of the nobility is not gone, but it has become circumscribed; it is shared with others the essential character of class legislation is being rapidly impaired, and the even see-saw which the privileged class kept going before the country for so many generations, by alternating the two elements of Whig and Tory in the administration, no longer succeeds to content a people who long for a personal share in the government, and desire the existence of ministries chosen purely by themselves.

Not a few persons will say that this is a basely misleading analysis of the great events of English history, and that the great causes for which men fought and died are not to be profaned by attaching to them the unworthy motive of power. We are not going to assert that patriotism was an element completely absent from the action of either great party which in turn possessed the reins of absolute power. England would not be the England of to-day if it had been so; nevertheless it is an undoubted fact in the history of a class or family, as it is in that of a people, and particularly of the English, that power for itself is the strongest motive which acts in influencing human action. The pursuit of politics is the search for power tempered by the sentiment called patriotism. If any one cares to deny the definition, he may do so-it will not alter the fact, unless he can prove that the majority of the world are a mass of invertebrate humanitarians.

There was a time in the history of this country when the hereditary principle can hardly have been said to exist. The early Saxon parliament, and later on the feudal parliament, exercised the right of occasionally departing from the direct line of royal succession, and deposed kings at their pleasure. Not only on the one hand did the barons or parliament of the nation require that each step in succession to the throne should be confirmed by them, but the Crown itself in its dealings with its barons was at one time very chary of conceding indefeasible succession to the estates which it granted to the feudal lords. Nevertheless the hereditary custom rapidly sprang up, and long before Henry the Eighth's reign became an established order of the realm both as regarded the Crown and also the nobility. It could hardly be denied that this was almost a necessary line of growth for State and social institutions to have taken. The men best fitted to lead in rough or troublesome times were clearly the powerful military castes. They alone were able to gather round them the active spirits among the people; and though they may not, and often did not, represent the highest light and wisdom of the country, they possessed the energy of character required in rulers amidst unsettled times. A system of hereditary descent of titles and dignities was the best means of, as it were, breeding up a distinct class, whose earliest impressions should be those of being destined to a particular profession, and the inheritance of certain responsibilities to maintain unimpaired the national great

ness.

Had the feudal system simply developed a caste and there stopped, it would have left little of its traces in our Constitution in the present day. The nobility of France developed pari passu with our own; but, while the French noblesse stagnated, ours progressed. The exemption from taxation and various privileges of the French nobles cut them off completely from the bourgeoisie-they became a caste in the true sense of the word. The English nobility, on the other hand, never at any period of its history, even during the troublous times of the seventeenth century, lost its touch with the people. For this and for many other reasons the hereditary principle has been accepted and respected by the people of this country. They have been used to attribute to its influence the rise and maintenance of great. families whose names are scattered everywhere through the pages of English history, now on the battle-field, now in the council, now in the parliament.

Nobles have died on the scaffold for the cause of liberty, and have alternately fought for or against the king and their own class; and whatever has been the chequered history of this country's progress, we find at every page the nobility more or less active on the popular side, defending the rights and liberties of the people. This is very different from what we find in the history of France, where the decay of the baronial system and that of the French nobility went

hand in hand, the infamous example of the Romish Church tending largely to increase the evil.

In England, then, the hereditary system has survived as the unique instance in the history of European States of a nobility which has preserved its hold on the respect of the people. The Crown cannot be said to embody the theory of hereditary descent as purely as the titles of the English nobles. The succession to the Crown has often been changed-the Stuarts were manifestly the rightful heirs, and the advent of the Georges was the invasion by a distant branch of German descent of the throne of the great Elizabeth. No doubt there were sound and good reasons for this change; nevertheless, hereditary descent has not been treated with the same sacred veneration as regards the throne, as it has been with regard to English titles of nobility. For centuries, then, the hereditary nobility of England have held a paramount influence in developing the principles of the Constitution of this country. The Liberal element among the Peers, backed and influenced by the popular feeling of the country, laid down the main lines of the charter of our liberties, and the reforms which were wildly fought against by the Tory Peers of later generations were won largely by a section of the Peers themselves supported by the people. These reforms are now the treasured element of the British Constitution with its limited monarchy, of which the Tory party consider themselves to be constituted by Providence the special guardians and high priests. The world which advances again stagnates; the lava of civilisation, as it pours down the mountain of Time, crystallises on its sides, until some fresh eruption of the popular will produces a new outburst of energy and carries our institutions nearer and nearer to their natural goal!

This natural goal is 'self-government.' We must here inquire, first, if the condition of civilisation is naturally tending to bring the people more and more into the position of directly ruling themselves, what place is there left for an hereditary nobility in the functions of government?

In the first place we must remember that events move with remarkable slowness in this country, and nothing more so than popular convictions. It takes an enormous stimulus to move the English; they move onward like a glacier-a lifetime only makes a change. The inertia of matter is as nothing to the inertia of the English mind. When it does move, however, its momentum is irresistible. We in England are not exposed, therefore, to the dangers which some countries suffer from-the demand for reform is a phenomenon not only of slow growth, but also of very easy observation. Moreover, there is an instinctive dread of change in this country, and consequently an inordinate veneration for what exists. The anomalies of the present are preferred by the many to the unknown contingencies of the future, and a theory of reform is not readily accepted

unless its entire future possibilities have been discounted. Not so the French. They accept a theory; and once accepted, they would burn the bones of their ancestors and scatter their ashes to the winds without a thought, if the inexorable law of their logic contained this conclusion. We are a temporising people fond of compromise. The only people which resembles us in character are the Americans; their immense national patience and power of collective self-control is the feature in which we are most similar. Thus, with the hereditary principle in England, it might go far on its road to ruin; it might be left far behind in the progress of reform; and yet, so long as a portion of the upper class in England are able to maintain their touch with the popular feeling, it may be in some form or another almost indefinitely preserved. The future must depend, however, on this saving clause-Will the hereditary nobility be able to maintain their touch with the people? Can an hereditary nobility become democratic in its character? These are hard questions to answer; they go to the very root of things. A governing class of nobles is an idea derived from a very early and different period of our social growth. Has the form of development so altered as necessarily to force back into a rudimentary and impotent condition this great social organ? Each person will answer this question to his own pleasure and according to his own conviction.

One thing is clear-whatever may be the eventual future, there is no indication that the existence of a nobility intimately associated with the government of the country should early become an impossibility in England. Of the purely hereditary character of those governing functions we cannot say the same. This hereditary character which is alike a feature of the Crown as it is of the House of Lords, although it has remained unaltered in principle, has received considerable modifications so far as pertains to their legislative functions.

The Crown has especially been modified in this respect. The ascendency of the Crown in the exercise of its prerogative vanished, as we know, with the Stuarts; and the attempts which were made by William, and later by the Georges, to govern by ministers who were irresponsible to the popular Chamber, were universally unsuccessful. Little by little the Crown has ceased to be able to exercise any direct influence on the House of Commons; and the deliberative power of the Cabinet, derived from being a standing committee of the Privy Council, has grown until it has eventually monopolised the entire control in State affairs. Ministries which once had to look to the king and his courtiers for favour and approval are now held by no restraint, except that which the approval of their party and the constituencies imposes on them. The acts of a popular ministry chosen by the public are executed in the name of an hereditary president, while the real standard of appeal is to the constituencies, upon whose shoulders has practically descended the imperial mantle.

No doubt the people have not yet become fully alive to the immensity of their inheritance. Every seven years or less the absolute power -the great Seal of the Realm'—is placed in their hands. It is for them to decide between the various political issues which the two chief contending parties place before them. These issues, however, are so often involved by minor questions of present consequence, and the problem is so purposely misstated or contorted by the one side and the other, that the main lines of contention are often lost, and the country wakes up to find that the great reforms which it would wish to see executed are to be staved off and indefinitely deferred, because it has bound itself over to a ministry or a party who have caught the country with a popular cry of State and Church, of England's dignity abroad, or of vested interests threatened at home.

Yet the people are gradually becoming educated—or at least an important part of them-to realise the magnitude of their power, and still there is no indication that they have any desire to subvert the existing order of things. The institution of the Crown, like that of the hereditary nobility, is not unpopular, even among the Liberal and Radical element of the great towns, though it would be absurd to deny that they could easily make themselves so, with very considerable danger to their existence as a power in the State. The only difference between their position to-day and that which it was formerly, is that of a man who is no longer protected against the acts of his own wilful folly; and, as it is to be hoped that both the Crown and the Hereditary Chamber have attained the age of discretion, we need fear no sudden changes in their established condition.

One thing, however, it is well to mark. The position of the Crown in England as a power in the State, and that of the House of Lords as a Legislative Chamber, are intimately connected the one with the other, and any disaster that befell the one could not fail to influence the position of the other. Either party could by ill-considered acts undermine the political position of its fellow. That rivalry which once existed between them before the great Reform Bill exists no more; their interests have become identical; and both of them, although they can afford to be liberal in their conception of State policy, feel themselves bound together as natural allies against a certain section of the democracy. It has been argued that the Crown could exist without the Peers; and so it might for a few months perhaps, since its power has been so indefinitely minimised, yet the convulsion which would be sufficient to destroy the House of Peers could not fail to render the edifice of the Crown a highly unstable and tottering structure. England is, as it has often been said, a republic in all but name; and the presidency of that republic, though hereditary in character, might be so easily altered that the country would hardly remark the change. It would therefore seem to be a matter of the very highest importance in the present day for the Crown and the