funds for Norwegian demagogues were provided by an association in Illinois. Were the present Irish tenants-satisfied by having in the meantime become owners of their farms-to desert the agitators, these would rapidly, like their Norwegian colleagues, extend the franchise, recruit their forces from the ranks of crofters and labourers, and change their language and their programme so as to suit their new adherents. They would manifest the utmost reluctance to contribute towards the Imperial defences; they would consider all questions of foreign and commercial policy, of coinage, of customs or excise from an exclusively selfish and narrow-minded point of view; they would go so far indeed as even to discourage a movement for assimilating the system of spelling in the two sister countries. And having hunted out some disputable point in the Act of Parliament establishing Home Rule, they would fasten upon that sentence whatever interpretation might be most unpalatable to England, most derogatory to the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament, and then unflinchingly engage in a constitutional quarrel of sixty to seventy years' duration. They would try to separate Irish from British diplomacy; they would agitate for the appointment of an Irish foreign secretary in Dublin, and finally condescend to confide the management of foreign affairs to a board made up of three Englishmen and three Irishmen, with Her Majesty as chairman. But I have all along been supposing the Irish to be as cool-headed as Norwegians; I have not taken heed of the rancour that must burn in their hearts on account of the briberies in the time of Pitt, and of the cruelties perpetrated by that remorseless set of men, the Irish Constabulary Force, at the bidding of tyrant Balfour!' Could the order of things but be reversed, so that Mr. Balfour might have administered coercion a century ago and the guineas of Mr. Pitt might now be pouring in!

As far as it goes the example afforded by the Norwegian peasantry is not calculated to fortify the opinion of those persons in England who in 1885 thought that the agricultural population could safely be entrusted with the same amount of political power as the city population, nor does it confirm the hope that an Irish Land Purchase Bill would deprive the Nationalist leaders of the bulk of their present supporters. It drives us on the other hand to the conclusion. that, if Mr. Parnell really were to show conspicuous moderation,' his followers would forsake him for men determined to push the principle of government by the people to its utmost consequences.

And now I fancy we get hold of the real secret of the Norwegian crisis. There is an inherent tendency in man to drive his pretensions to inordinate lengths. Who is equal in one respect,' says Aristotle, 'wants to be equal in all respects; this is the chief cause of the overthrow of constitutions.' And human faults become intensified in parties; human imperfections are magnified beyond proportion when individuals gather into classes. This is why satirists bent upon showVOL. XXIII.-No. 131.

F

ing up the weaknesses of mankind in a strong light have generally fastened not so much on the peculiarities of individuals as on those of professions and classes of society, such as servants, soldiers, monks, priests, physicians, lawyers, &c. A mob has the tendency to be as foolish, reckless, and cruel as the worst elements out of which it is composed. A political faction possessing a majority in the legislature starts by attempting to get hold of the whole legislative power. Neither in England nor in Norway does it rest until it has got rid of all constitutional checks. Where an Upper House exists, it contrives to lower its influence, and as to the king's right to choose his ministers and to withhold his sanction from bills, it finishes by abolishing these privileges, if not theoretically, at all events practically. In Norway we have been observing how it tried in 1884 to obtain full control of the executive, and how for that purpose it encroached on the judicial power. In 1887 we have witnessed very similar proceedings in France and England. In England the House of Commons has afforded a judge ground for criticising from the bench its interference with judicial questions, and a party leader has ventured to condemn both the utterances and the legal action of magistrates. In France a majority of deputies institute judicial inquiries, force the President of the Republic to abdicate, and a zealous and noisy minority goes in for abolishing both Senate and Presidency.

How wise the framers of the American Constitution were when they gave the Senate and the President sufficient power to withstand a momentary popular impulse and to arrest the system of encroachments inseparable from a House of Representatives! The election of the President by the people, and of the Senators by the single States, and the six years' duration of a Senator's term against the two years of a Representative's office, were checks of great value. Without them there are many reasons for thinking that American politics might be in as great a confusion as French affairs. It has been interesting to see from the last manifesto of the Count of Paris that the writer has been a closer observer of American, English, French, and German constitutional life than most of the journalists who have criticised him. As Professor Gneist says, it is not any longer the question in certain countries how to protect popular representation against the governing power of the State, but on the contrary how to protect the country against an abuse of the governing power by a majority of deputies of the people. And as Professor von Holst writes about the United States, the principal danger to guard against is the executive power falling into the hands of Congress (die Verbildung der Congressherrschaft in Congressregierung).

Man's insatiable covetousness and envy destroy not only the contentment of the human heart but also the balance of political communities. Like the boy bursting into tears at the sight of his birthday cake, because a brother and sister are already relishing the

prospect of having a slice of it, so a popular assembly is by nature dissatisfied with ever so large a share of political power; it wants the whole of it; as the masses claim equality with the classes, it claims equality with the Crown. But what both mean is not equality, but superiority. Because absolutism and aristocratic or bureaucratic government have generally displayed a more lively interest for the advantage of the reigning dynasty or the ruling class than for the rest of the nation, popular government has for a century been considered more conducive to the welfare of the greatest number. But the sudden and complete breakdown of British and French parliamentary government, the Hydra of Irish discontent, and the turn things are taking in Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other countries, must open our eyes to the fact that, by claiming for one man one vote, by subordinating intelligence and property to numbers, by granting political rights to individuals who perform no political duties, Liberals have overshot the mark. The greatest good of the greatest number will not be secured by 'counting heads;' the educated classes and those possessing a stake in the country will have again to obtain the control of parliaments, and the executive must in some way or other be endowed with sufficient strength to stand on its own legs and not to be condemned to inaction by a parcel of obstructive deputies. It is only in practice that the King of Norway and the Queen of England have become the humble servants of their legislatures. Let their subjects beg them to reassert their slumbering prerogatives and the government will be able to consolidate the Union and to maintain law and order against thoughtless masses and unscrupulous agitators. For Liberals who are utterly blind to the imminent danger of mob-rule and have nothing on their minds but fear of the narrow-mindedness and class selfishness of the old Tories, it is consistent to claim parliamentary government for the Irish. And it is precisely this consistency which has gained over the Caucus to Home Rule. But those who perceive that popular government in England, as in Norway, has overshot the mark and is landing in mob-rule, are equally consistent if they refuse to endow Ireland with a system that has broken down at Westminster, Christiania, and Paris, not to mention other capitals. It is a fact worthy of notice that a section of Norwegian Liberals is at present supporting the Conservatives for the purpose of not only saving the union, but restoring to the executive the independence which it formerly possessed, and which it ought to possess for the sake of that large minority whose best representative in a republic is the president, in a monarchy the king. The parliamentary system becomes an absurdity if the opposition has no chance of getting into office; and yet a Conservative ministry will never be able to maintain itself for any length of time against a widely extended suffrage, unless the moneyed and leisured classes combine and find themselves backed by a powerful executive. In England and Norway

parliamentary debates no longer control the policy of the country, but platform oratory dominates. A gifted poet like Björnson sways the masses and fills their brains with utopian ideas to the detriment of his country. We have drawn a false lesson from American events if we imagine that the equal participation of every citizen in the government of the State is the remedy for our social and economical evils. The examples of England, Ireland, and Norway between 1880 and 1888 ought to act as a warning.

The Count of Paris may be partly mistaken as to the merits of the new method of government which he recommends for France. But he is unquestionably right in looking out for some safeguards and balances to popular government, which France and England have unluckily thrown overboard. He may be said to have found them in Prussian and German institutions. Somewhere between the lines traced in these constitutions and the system prevailing actually in England and France, the golden middle course will in all probability have to be sought for. And if this be not done while a period of calm prevails, it will have to be accomplished when the billows dash high above the bulwarks, and when the rudder of the State drifts helplessly to and fro.

Mr. J. A. Froude thinks that England never has succeeded and never will succeed in governing Ireland constitutionally. I agree or disagree with him according to the signification accorded to this term. If we take constitutional' in the sense in which all Gladstonians and perhaps 90 per cent. of Englishmen understand the word -viz. as signifying a system where the executive is absolutely dependent on a popular assembly chosen by nearly universal suffrage -I entirely agree with him. I disagree, on the contrary, if we take a constitutional government to mean-as it more properly does mean -a condition of things where an executive, with a will and a power of its own, is controlled and directed by two independent assemblies, each of them in a different degree the representative of enlightened public opinion, but neither of them in possession of sovereign power.

3

Leopold von Ranke uttered a warning in 1848, which has only quite lately been published; he feared that if universal suffrage were introduced in England, the British constitution would not hold a day longer; labourers and Irishmen would get the government into their own hands. The extension of the franchise in Great Britain in 1885, and the franchise existing in Norway, would not have met with Aristotle's approval, any more than with Ranke's; for the Greek sage objected to farmers participating in the government of his 'best of States,' because, as he says, 'the exercise of political activity requires complete leisure.'

See L. v. Ranke's Sämmtliche Werke, Bd. 50, p. 597. Leipzig, 1887.

We know that there is a school which attributes all suffering on earth to law and order, and which is looking forward to a period when the present notions on political and social questions will be consigned to Jupiter and Saturn. Should adherents of this school ever elimb into power on the ladder of universal suffrage, both the Norwegian peasantry and well-to-do British Liberals will perhaps rue the moment when-to make use of the simile employed by Pope Pius the Ninth-they set the stone a-rolling. The ancient Romans could not help conceding a political vote to the Have-nots, but they took good care not to let it be anything like an equal vote with the 'Haves.' A sensible division of political power would be to accord approximately one-third of it to intelligence, one-third to property, one-third to numbers-as far as means can be found for bringing about a similar result.

Strenuous partisans of government by the people will not be satisfied before they have found some special explanation for its breakdown in Norway. They will probably seek for it in the insufficiency of popular or religious education. Now as to the importance of education, we shall all be ready to agree with what Mr. Andrew Dickson White has stated in a capital speech made lately at the Centennial banquet in Philadelphia. After drawing a picture of the mob which passes at one bound from extreme credulity toward demagogues to extreme scepticism toward statesmen-from mawkish sympathy for criminals to bloodthirsty ferocity against the innocent -from the wildest rashness to the most abject fear,' after saying that 'the voice of a mob has been in all time evil-for it has ever been the voice of a tyrant, conscious of power, unconscious of responsibility,' Mr. White proceeds to show what an indispensable complement to popular government education is. Well, as far as popular instruction is concerned, I should say Norway was well abreast of the United States; it introduced a sound system of education earlier than France or England, and its system has certain distinct advantages over the German one.-I shall perhaps be told that political education is not synonymous with popular instruction; that a healthy political instinct and true patriotism have their strongest roots in habits of local self-government. I am far from contradicting this proposition. I only answer that, with the exception of the Swiss, no peasantry in Europe has had a greater practice in local selfgovernment than the Norwegian.

One influence has perhaps remained unnoticed—the religious one. Are the vagaries of Norwegian Radicalism to be explained by want of religious feeling or religious instruction? By no means; in both respects the condition of things among Norwegian peasants is more satisfactory than almost anywhere else on the Continent. Is there then nothing in the world which a friend of Norway could suggest A. D. White, The Constitution and American Education. Ithaca, 1887.