changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?

You

In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are passing through a great transformation, social, religious, and political. The process is full of embarrassments, difficulties, and perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. To set them all down to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to Liberalism. cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly entering on a new stage. Form of government is the smallest part of it. It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us, who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of the past. This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able to do.

But will wise guidance be endured? Sir Henry Maine seems to think that it will not. Mill thought that it would. In a singularly luminous passage in an essay which for some reason or another he never republished, Mill says

We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral convictions. But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or their class feelings. We have a strong faith, stronger than either

I

politicians or philosophers generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men's minds; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own side of the question. We expect few conversions by the mere force of reason from one creed to the other. Men's intellects and hearts have a large share in determining what sort of Conservatives or Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals.

This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal assumptions of some bad philosophers, French, Bolivian, or others.

LIBERALISM AND REACTION.

I.

IN the little volume 1 on which I ask leave to offer a few observations, the author, a writer of highly approved competence, asks whether the ideals of the reforming era have lost their efficacy. Have its watchwords ceased to move, is it not true that even the old idols of theatre and market-place have fallen from their pedestals; that an epidemic of unbelief has run through our western world-unbelief in institutions, in principles, churches, parliaments, books, divinities, worst of all, and at the root of all, of man himself? Such epidemics are familiar in the annals of mankind. They are part of the manicheism of human history, the everlasting struggle between the principles of good and evil, and make us think of Luther's comparison of our race to the drunken man on horseback -you no sooner prop him up on one side than he sways heavily to the other. What is the share of democracy in bringing the rider to this precarious and unedifying case? In these high matters let

1 Democracy and Reaction. By L. T. Hobhouse. Fisher Unwin, 1904.

us be sure that nothing is as new as people think. Names are new. Light catches aspects heretofore unobserved. Temperature rises and falls. Yet the elements of the cardinal controversies of human society are few, and they are curiously fixed. Though the ages use ideas differently, the rival ideas themselves hold on in their preappointed courses. Democracy is not new any more than is reaction.

An accomplished Frenchman, now dead, one of the ten thousand critics of democracy, illustrates by a story of his friend Bersot his conviction that human nature will remain to the end pretty like itself, apart from forms of government or measures of social economy. One day Bersot, writing upon Arcachon and its pleasures, wound up his article by saying, 'As for happiness, why there, as everywhere else, you must yourself bring it with you.' So Scherer himself, in like spirit, could not but believe that it is the same with institutions. They depend on what men bring with them. In a less discouraged spirit, or rather with no discouragement of spirit at all, Mr. Hobhouse still recognises that self-government is not in itself a solution of all political and social difficulties. 'It is at best,' he says, 'an instrument with which men who hold by the ideal of social justice and human progress can work, but when those ideals grow cold, it may, like other instruments, be turned to base uses.' The fundamental reform for which the times call is rather a reconsideration of the ends for which all civilised government exists; in a word, the return

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to a saner measure of social values. We shall be under no illusion,' he concludes, 'about democracy. The golden radiance of its morning hopes has long since faded into the light of common day. Yet, that dry light of noon serves best for those whose task it is to carry on the work of the world.' Reformers are so apt to overlook the truth set out by Tocqueville, when he said that nations are like men, they are still prouder of what flatters their passions than of what serves their interests. Our author's description of the sources and processes by which public opinion in our time is formed, is not lacking in trenchancy, and it might give a pleasure, certainly not intended by its author, to the cynical persons, either at home here or across the Channel, who regard popular government as elaborate dupery, were it not for the author's fervid perception and enforcement of the prime truth, that under every political or social question lies the moral question.

For this sorry transformation he finds four causes. First, he names decay in vivid and profound religious beliefs.’ This decay was in process a generation ago, but its effects at that time were set off by the rise of a humanitarian feeling which, partly in alliance with the recognised Churches, and partly outside them, took in a measure the place of the old convictions, supplying stimulus and guidance to effort, and yielding a basis for serious and rational public life. These promises have not come true.