DEMOCRACY AND PARTY.

ABOUT two months ago Lord Wolseley startled the British public by his emphatic denunciation of our military and naval inefficiency, ascribing it to the cheese-paring economy which every Government in turn feels itself compelled to practise in deference to the exigencies of our party system, which he called the curse of England.' Some time after this the writer of a letter in The Times who signed himself a Rear-Admiral told us that it was useless to throw the blame on party; that party was essential to our system of constitutional government, and that we must all conform to its requirements. The question here raised is one, as it seems to me, of great practical importance, and one that will very soon force itself on the attention of us all, whether we will or no. But as neither Lord Wolseley nor the Rear-Admiral, of whose name I am entirely ignorant, but who may fairly be taken as the representative of a large section of public opinion on the subject, go to the root of the matter, I should wish to add a few words on the political aspect of the controversy. Party can hardly be all that Lord Wolseley says it is, for history contradicts him. It is not, I hope, all that the Rear-Admiral says it is, for in that case the constitution is in jeopardy. If the party system and the inefficiency of the public services are related to each other as cause and effect at all—and I do not deny that they are-the connection, I think, will be found of quite recent origin.

The party system flourished in its full vigour from 1688 to 1832, and I cannot see that any of our military or naval failures during that interval can be directly traced to it. Some, no doubt, were due to the intestine squabbles of the oligarchy; but that is not what Lord Wolseley was thinking of in his speech at Sir John Pender's, and whatever ill effects flowed from these disputes might have been equally caused by the quarrels of rival grandees at the court of an absolute monarch. We are all thinking of something very different from this when we speak of the party system. Lord Chatham has been quoted as an instance of what one man could do who set his heel on party, and put an end to all the intrigues and deadlocks of which it is the alleged parent. But this argument is founded on some misconception of the crisis at which Lord Chatham was summoned to the helm. It seems to

some years, been in a state administration of Henry Opposition was dormant ; regular Tory party found already beginning to look

imply that all our failures before Chatham became minister were due to the action of party, and that all our victories after he became minister were due to its suppression. But at the beginning of the Seven Years' War party had already, for of suspended animation. Under the Pelham it fell into a kind of torpor. Jacobitism was extinguished; and the nothing for their hands to do, and were forward to the chances of a new reign. From 1750 to 1756, at all events, there was nothing in the aspect of the party system to have deterred ministers from strengthening our army and navy in any manner which seemed good to them; and in fact it was not strengthening that these services then required, but animating, inspiring, and stimulating. This was what Lord Chatham did. He did not stamp out party, for there was nothing deserving of the name to stamp out. But he came into power as the representative of a great burst of national indignation, provoked by a series of defeats which set the country in a flame. This was the secret of his power and of his influence over other men. This was what inspired Hawke and Wolfe. They saw that the spirit of the country was fully roused, and that Chatham had the country at his back. Of course, there was everything in the man himself to enable him to make the most of such a position: the grand tone, the imperial mien, the strong will, the infectious daring. But the position itself was not at all unlike that of Lord Palmerston when he took office in 1855. He, too, rode into power on a wave of popular wrath produced by very similar causes, and it made him minister for life. But I do not recollect that any obstacle to the augmentation of our national armaments previous to the Crimean War arose out of the party system. The Duke of Wellington had stirred the public mind on the subject; but at that time we had no suspicion of our real deficiencies. That was the cause of our disasters; and not, as far as I can see, the operation or the influence of party.

On the other hand, if we look back to the beginning of the century, when the strife of party was at its height, and when Governments might well have been deterred from the military and naval expenditure required by the great war, we find our arms almost invariably successful, and what few failures we experienced due not to economy but incompetence. There was perhaps one short period when the Peninsular War was in danger of being starved, though Wellington himself remembered nothing of it afterwards. But it was not cheese-paring which caused our failures in Holland, the retreat of Sir John Moore, or the fate of the Walcheren expedition. It does not seem to me then that in times past party spirit has done the harm which Lord Wolseley at the present moment imputes to it, or that any serious disasters have been either produced by its presence or

prevented by its absence. If the case is different to-day, and if we really are in danger from the straits to which ministers are reduced owing to the pressure of the party system, what is the reason of the difference? Is it a mere transient phenomenon? or does it indicate the working of one of those slow, silent, and almost imperceptible changes in our constitutional system, which have been likened to such as take place in our physical constitution, and of which we only become gradually aware as they approach completion? This is the question to which it is the object of this paper to try to discover some kind of answer. Party certainly has not always been the curse of England.' If it has become so in our own time, it is well that, we should know the truth, and know also the reason of it.

6

It seems to be forgotten that what we now understand by party is of comparatively modern growth, and was evolved out of the confusion of a revolutionary epoch to meet the exigencies of a very peculiar form of government, till then unknown in Europe, and equally remote from both the experience of statesmen and the speculations of philosophers. Our ancestors soon found out that to escape from absolute monarchy was not necessarily to escape from arbitrary power. It was discovered that either the minister acting through the sovereign, or the sovereign acting through the minister, might still exercise a virtual dictatorship, if he had only the unconnected and unorganised criticism of groups or individuals to contend with, incapable of combining into any permanent and coherent opposition, or if they did so for a particular purpose, sure to melt away again as soon as the occasion had passed. Hence came to be felt the necessity of forming a regular opposition, on the model of a standing army, of which all the members should be pledged to stand by each other under all circumstances, to win or lose together, and never to make separate terms with the common enemy. Such was the origin of the two great political confederacies which governed the country by turns throughout the Georgian era. It was never a really good system, because, of course, the chiefs of parties, like the chiefs of clans, were naturally anxious to increase their following by every means in their power, and, when they had anything to give away, thought more of rewarding adherents and enticing recruits, than of the public service; yet it is questionable if England did not occupy a higher position among the nations of Europe while it continued to flourish than she has done since it was destroyed.

But this by the bye. Party, as I have said, was the product of very exceptional circumstances, and was from the first a highly artificial system, requiring to be worked by trained politicians, imbued with all the esoteric traditions, prescriptions, and unwritten understandings of the oligarchical period, and liable to come to great grief when worked without regard to them. It was based on a political fiction which, however useful a device in the hands of those

who understood it, was obviously not fit to be entrusted to those who were ignorant of its meaning. But since party first came into being the dynasty has been changed, the constitution has been altered, the House of Commons has been three times reconstructed. Power has been widely redistributed; the social centre of gravity has shifted; and the political dangers against which our forefathers thought it their duty to provide have given way to new ones, arising from a totally different quarter. Should we not naturally expect that a system so evidently devised to meet the wants of a special stage of politics, and placing both the independence and ambition of individuals under such severe restraint, would have some difficulty in adapting itself to the ever-varying vicissitudes of popular government, and that after all the changes I have mentioned, and the century and three-quarters that have passed, it might be found an anachronism?

I say, is not this what might à priori be anticipated? Why should we take it for granted that a method matured under one set of conditions should necessarily work well under another; or that arrangements admirably well adapted to a time when the governing class was a small and exclusive body, easily brought within the harness of party rules and maxims, and taught to act in obedience to them, should suit equally well with household suffrage, and immense constituencies, too large to be controlled by the old organisation, too independent to care for the old watchwords, and unprovided even with that elementary political training which teaches men the necessity of resisting particular considerations when general principles are at stake?

There was a time when the number of electors who did possess this last qualification bore such a proportion to the rest as to neutralise the properties of the democratic element intermingled with them. But that is no longer the case. We are now left completely exposed to the force of that political impatience which is one of the most marked characteristics of democracy; and no wonder if, when we continue to play the game of politics according to the old rules, and with due observance of all the old traditions and obligations, we lay up for ourselves a plentiful harvest of embarrassments, disappointments, and disasters. Had party been a much simpler and a much more natural method of government than it is, it must have possessed extraordinary flexibility to be equally suitable to all the political variations through which this country has passed since the foundations of parliamentary government were first securely fixed. But that so very singular and complex an engine should exhibit this amount of versatility would have been thought impossible by any one standing at the other end of the interval, and looking forward into the future from the accession of George the First. Could any one a hundred and seventy years ago have foreseen the various developments and modifications.

of the constitution which have occurred since then, he would probably have felt certain that long before they were exhausted party would have ceased to exist.

We now, therefore, seem to be approaching the point at which we can distinguish the truth from the error both in Lord Wolseley's statement and in the Rear-Admiral's. Party, though not upon the whole, or from any general point of view, 'the curse of England,' may have become so under present circumstances. Party, though a necessity of our constitutional government under one form, need not be so under another. Constitutional government is a generic term for a large variety of species. The monarchy of 1690 was a constitutional monarchy; and the monarchy of 1888 is a constitutional monarchy. Yet no one in his senses would pretend to say they were the same. In the descent from unlimited monarchy to unlimited democracy there are many grades and platforms, and, though all come under the common denomination of constitutional, they differ so widely from each other, not merely in details, but even in what may be called secondary principles, that for all purposes of argument it is necessary to treat them as distinct. Let us say that we now live under a constitutional democratic monarchy. There is a wide enough difference between that and a constitutional aristocratic monarchy. We are now trying to carry on the former with the political machinery constructed only to fit the latter. The result cannot long be doubtful. The system is strained to bursting. It gapes at every joint. All its weak points, all its vices, all its anomalies formerly half-concealed from view by its practical convenience, now stand revealed to the naked eye for every tiro in the art of politics to gibe and flout at. It is becoming more and more clearly understood that our old method no longer serves the purpose which it fulfilled formerly, as a check upon arbitrary power without being at the same time a bar to honest administration. It is felt that self-government now covers too wide a surface for the system to act upon with effect; and that, to put the matter shortly, it is impossible to array the forces of democracy according to the manual of party.

Now let us consider for a moment how it was that the party system worked as well as it did for so many years, and so as to call forth the encomiums of men like Burke, Cornewall Lewis, and Disraeli. It worked in this way. It was necessary to its efficient action that the voting public should be divided into two distinct bodies, corresponding to the two parties within the walls of the House of Commons, each in favour of some distinct political principle and some particular method of government. Now from 1714 to 1832 there were two such parties in the country, and they were practically co-extensive with the voting classes. Of course, there were the old popular franchises which even before the Reform Bill brought a large working-class element into the constituencies, but not large enough