of stability are sound. Here is what Mr. Roosevelt -wrote some years ago:

There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and its possessors in the present age, and I suppose there have been in all ages. There are many rich people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show such sordid and selfish traits of character, or lead such mean and vacuous lives, that all right-minded men must look upon them with angry contempt; but, on the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens than the thriftless; and the worst capitalist cannot harm labouring men as they are harmed by demagogues. As the people of a State grow more and more intelligent, the State itself may be able to play a larger and larger part in the life of the community, while at the same time individual effort may be given freer and less restricted movement along certain lines . . . There may be better schemes of taxation than those at present employed; it may be wise to devise inheritance taxes, and to impose regulations on the kinds of business which can be carried on only under the especial protection of the State; and where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, and in this country generally has been, promptly done away with; but the first lesson to teach the poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in the community is distinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in the long run because other men are well off; and that the surest way to destroy what measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyse industry and the wellbeing of those men who have achieved success.1

It is interesting, in contrast to such a passage, to recall Macaulay's well-known letter to a gentleman in New York in 1857: The day will come when,

1 American Ideals (1902), pp. 210, 211.

in the State of New York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries? Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread? . . . There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor.'

Yet amid fierce storm and flood for the years since Macaulay wrote, the American anchor has proved itself no mere kedge. Moral forces decide the strength and weakness of constitutional contrivance. The hunger for breakfast and dinner has not been the master impulse in the history of civilised communities. Selfish and interested individualism has been truly called non-historic. Sacrifice has been the law-sacrifice for creeds, for churches, for kings, for dynasties, for adored teachers, for native land. In England and America to-day the kind of devotion that once inspired followers of Stuarts, Bourbons, Bonapartes, marks a nobler and a deeper passion for the self-governing Commonwealth. Democracy

has long passed out beyond mere praise and blame. Dialogues and disputations on its success or failure are now an idle quarrel. Democracy is what it is. Its own perils encompass it. They are many, they are grave. Spiritual power in the old sense there is none; the material power of wealth is formidable. Like kings and nobles in old time, so in our time, the man in the street will have his sycophants and parasites. At least, as we close Mr. Hobhouse's little book, it is a satisfaction to remember that during these last years of spurious Imperialism in our country, he and other writers of his stamp-instructed, able, diligent, disinterested, and bold-were found to tell both masses and directing classes what they judged to be the truth. This is what the salvation of democracy depends upon.

APHORISMS.1

I AM going to ask you to pass a tranquil hour in pondering a quiet chapter in the history of books. One Saturday night last summer I found myself dining with an illustrious statesman on the Welsh border, and on the Monday following I was seated under the acacias by the shore of the Lake of Geneva, where Gibbon, a hundred years ago almost to the day, had, according to his own famous words, laid down his pen after writing the last lines of his last page, and there under a serene sky, with the silver orb of the moon reflected from the waters, and amid the silence of nature, felt his joy at the completion of an immortal task dashed by melancholy that he had taken everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion. It was natural that I should meditate on the contrast that might be drawn between great literary performance and great political performance, between the making of history and the writing of it-a contrast containing matter enough not only for one, but for a whole series of edifying and instructive discourses. Politics presented difficulties, and I fell back on such book-reflections as

1 An Address at Edinburgh in 1887.