does not fade so long as you read. It is for the purpose of balancing that absurd discrepancy, to take only

The Spectator.

one illustration, that we are all invited to put Dickens stamps in our books.

The February number of the "National Review" contained an illuminating article by an Imperialist lady, in which she describes her experiences as a political speaker in a Fenland constituency during the recent election. The article casts a vivid light on what we may call the Primrose League view of the country poor. The writer hurries down from town to Fenland, literally on the eve of the poll, deserting a symphony concert and upsetting “the W.'s dinner party" by her departure. As the train steams out of King's Cross, she opens a despatch box, and begins to compose her speeches. She "selects her ammunition from an arsenal of pamphlets with which she is provided," but sighs to think that "her fate is usually an audience on whom the measured eloquence of statesmen is wasted, and who are not in the least impressed by extracts from Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone, proving that those eminent Liberals were staunch supporters of principles which their degenerate successors are disowning." Yes, that is it-the stolidity of the agricultural poor. talk to them. sive masks one quite made up.

It is really useless to Beneath those impasfeels their minds are They will not listen

to the voice of the charmer, charm she never so wisely. Not even copious extracts from those eminent Militarists and Tariff Reformers, Richard Cobden and John Bright, can shake their bigoted adhesion to the prejudices which are ruining the country. These brainless, and, it is to be feared, too often befuddled people, rashly entrusted with the weapon of a vote, will listen to all the lady has to say, and

then go away and vote against Tariff Reform. So the village Baptist hears the Rector quote St. Basil and St. Ambrose, and next Sunday takes his dour and customary drive to chapel.

We like the lady politician's account of her arrival at her inn, "The Blue Boar." Of this hostelry she very truly observes that it is "genuine Dickens." In one Fenland town, by the way, there is a perfectly delightful inn. A monastic quiet still broods over the whole town. The place has preserved an atmosphere of almost incredible remoteness. So out of the world is it, that, on Sunday afternoons, the young men do not ride off on bicycles, but, dressed in their Sunday best, hang over the strange old stone bridge. This is no mere passage over water, but some religious station of the monks. On it still stands a sacred Figure, in way-worn, woe-struck, weather-beaten majesty. The "National Review" writer speaks of the "lovely old Queen Anne candlesticks" at the "Blue Boar." So we longed to carry off, from the inn we speak of, an old glass beer jug, engraved two hundred years ago with the dove carrying in her bill a spray of hops pluckt off. This, we had fondly imagined, was a fancy of our own. "The 'Blue Boar' is the headquarters of our side," our speaker writes, "but a little further down," she adds unkindly, "there is a Temperance Hotel, much patronized by the others." We hasten to assure her that some of the most impenitent of those "others" know and love the "Blue Boar." What scenes of the past do such old inns evoke, with Toby-juglike figures gossiping on eighteenth

I

"These agricultural laborers are something crool. No brains, no eddication-but there! We spend millions a year on eddication, but what do we turn out? They can read and write, but they can't think." (From this point on, these last words occur like a refrain through the rest of the article.) "London is a crool disappointment. can't understand it at all. Never could understand a working man being a Liberal. . . As for Socialism, its ridiklous. Flying in the face of nature." This fiery apostle appears to have broken away from his hereditary political creed. "I've been a shoemaker myself, and my father and brothers-all Radicals. Shoemakers and tailors are usually Radicals, and mostly Atheists." Could the Primrose League contempt for shoemakers and tailors and the base mechanic rabblebabble of places like Birmingham and Leicester and Northampton be more concisely expressed?

The account of the journey's end is hardly encouraging. The motor-car is received with "loud booing" in the village. "The schoolroom is nearly empty, save for a few young girls, and a few old ladies in the front seats." These old ladies are, no doubt, the true remnant. "The chair is a rugged-faced old farmer, eighty years old and stone deaf." The booing youths take their stand at the back of the room. Fresh contingents of men keep coming in at

the door, where they stand three deep, pipe in mouth, hands in pocket, cap on head, staring at the lady speaker. Alas! for the manners of Arcady. "The local chairman of committee prefers a request. The Radicals have put a notice all over the village that, if Mr. Brown gets in, bread and butter will be heavily taxed. Will I deal with this? It is a request with which every speaker on our side is familiar!" Yes indeed. In Arcady it is the one subject we want to hear about. For the woes of Irish landlords we have no tears to spend.

The whole article is so lifelike and so instructive that the reader will pardon a few more quotations. They hardly need one word of comment. The writer next gives the candid expression of her feeling about the rustic audience she has come from London to address:

I wonder whether other speakers have the same feeling of utter incompetence that comes over me when I stand up and face such an audience as this. The blank, bucolic faces, the wreaths of smoke rising up from heavy lips, the expressionless eyes all turned upon me, the thick boots ready to shuffle on the floor. What is one to talk about? Can they understand these questions of high politics, these grave constitutional issues? They can read and write, but they eannot think.

.

No, but they can feel. Their fathers were reasoned with in the Greek portico of the hungry 'forties (to borrow a phrase of George Meredith's), and they themselves know what it is to be cold and wet and hungry. At the best of times it is still hard work to get enough to eat for themselves and their children. No sophistry will make them take a single step towards making it harder. Meanwhile, they will listenthey rather like listening to a good speaker on any side or subject. After half-an-hour our lady "sits down amid very kindly applause."

They are the despair of the propertied and titled gentry who wish to tax their food, and who cannot do it without their consent. The chairman of her next meeting gave the lady his "impressions of the neighborhood." From internal evidence, we should say that he was a retired military man. He spoke once, and twice also we have heard the same. We have heard it from colonels and farmers and squires and parsons' wives. He said:

The only things they care about are their stomachs and their pockets. No use talking to them about the Empire, and as for Home Rule, they don't know what it means. They've never seen a ship-most of 'em, and don't care a brass farthing for the Navy, or anything that really matters. Ireland? No, they take no interest in it at all.

This witness is true. To the people, their pockets and their stomachs are the things that really matter. How can it be otherwise? To us also it seems that for the people to have decent houses to live in and food enough to eat are the things that really matter. When these are attained, by all means let them see ships and learn something of the people of other countries, and their solidarity with them.

But our lady speaker is not discouraged. If they are apathetic, it is because they are ignorant, and, for her part, she "will talk Empire and Navy, God and our Country wherever she may go." In this list of nouns, note the position accorded to the third. A fervent lady Tariff Reformer lately remarked to a friend of the present writer: "We're not doing it for ourselves-it's for the Almighty." God and Tariff Reform! We are reminded of some lines of Don Juan":

The Nation.

God and the Empress! Oh! ye Powers Eternal, such names mingled.

We quote once more:

It's a bit of romance, this election. Tom Brown was born at X., of poor parents. In Australia he has made his pile, and he comes back-an Imperialist, of course-with one great ambition, to represent his native place at Westminster. A splendid candidate, everyone says-if he cannot get in, no one could.

No, under these conditions no one can. The fact stated above, of course, appeals strongly to popular sentiment and local patriotism. "Home again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London," but you must not try to tax our food.

Will this Fenland desert ever blossom as the rose of Tariff Reform, will it become a Primrose wood in spring, a Botticelli Primavera with its dancing nymphs? Our writer is doubtfully hopeful-she suggests Empire maps and flags.

Twenty meetings, aye, or two hundred, will not send an Imperialist back to Westminster as member for X., if the men who are to elect him are brought up in schools where there is neither an Empire map nor a British flag.... Forty meetings, or four hundred, will not really help to bring enlightenment to an electorate, of which the majority are taught to read and write but not to think.

If this were done, they might, perhaps, be got to prefer maps and flags and stones to bread. The article ends sadly:

Tom Browne has not got the wish of his heart yet, and X. is represented at Westminster by a Radical wrecker.

Plural voting at the present time is, as we know, anathema to the Radical doctrinaire. He even finds it difficult to discuss calmly, for "one man one vote" apparently represents to him the irreducible minimum of political integrity. That gerrymandering piece of legislation-the threatened new Liberal Reform Bill-will sweep away every trace of the accursed thing; or so its promoters intend. They clearly hold that when once plural voting is abolished, and, presumably, adult suffrage established, then, and only then, government by the counting of heads will bring all things to prosperity and perfection.

Now there exists a corrective to these crude views in the working model of the necessary modifications entailed by appreciation of the doubtful blessing of such rule. The stormy period during which Belgium remodelled her Constitution and established her limited monarchy and representative government was productive of a compromise between these two incompatibles, as Liberals consider them-plural voting and universal suffrage-which though intricate, is instructive. It exposes some Radical fallacies to which we are here accustomed, and this may be one reason why invincible ignorance of plural voting under Belgian conditions appears to flourish and abound in that party.

Belgium, in short, is a country in possession of le suffrage universel plural. There every male citizen over the age of twenty-five years possesses one vote in virtue of his age and birth qualification. In passing, we note that the higher limit of the constitutional coming of age might be advantageous in our own country. The Belgian citizen may however still more increase his voting powers without a corresponding

increase of his substance. By the famous Article 47 of the Constitution, Belgium allows three additional qualifications to confer the privilege of plural voting in a kingdom enjoying none the less the democratic blessing of universal suffrage, and since 1899 of proportional representation as well. Again, to our Radical doctrinaire these anomalies must be distressing, although we have cause to perceive that proportional representation is no longer to him a pleasing prospect. It is even to be feared that the oracle of other Liberal days-John Stuart Mill-would find his support thereof dismissed with a smile at his Utopian simplicity, since it is now doubtful whether proportional representation would advantage his party. The electoral system of Belgium, however, is influenced towards the bestowal of plural votes by considerations additional to those of property. Fatherhood is, under her Constitution, one ground of admission to a second franchise; the patres conscripti of the commonwealth come to their own in a practical acknowledgment. Every man of thirty-five years of age, married or a widower, and having children, may claim his plural vote provided that he also pays a minimum of five francs a year in income-tax. “I have been ever of opinion," said the immortal Vicar, "that the honest man who married and brought up a large family did more service than he who continued single and only talked of population." Belgium unquestionably approves the sentiment. The plural voter there has however other opportunities also. Possessing a diploma of the schools of learning or endowed with professional qualifications indicative of a trained intelligence, he has two more votes at his disposal. Finally, one small sop to the Cerberus of property

exists under this scheme.

It is true that the incorrigible, or unfortunate, bachelor may qualify for the vote additional as well as may the father of a family; but it is enacted that he in the last resort must be the richer man of the two. Belgium insists that he must have something at stake in the prosperity of the country other than the fact of bare existence in possible defiance of every eugenic consideration. On the score of property, real estate to the value of two thousand francs or an income of one hundred francs derived from the State securities of the country, satisfies her moderate demand. Under these conditions of plural voting the universal suffrage by which both Chamber of Deputies and Senate (with the exception of twenty-six members) are elected, is in Belgium accordingly exercised.

What, we may ask, is the fundamental principle of this form of plural voting? It appears to be a sound and, where universal suffrage or any ap proach thereto is adopted, an evidently necessary safeguard. As a rough rule the defence of the property qualification for additional votes or for any vote, will be that the virtue and intelligence of the possessors are promoted by such favoring circumstances. Property furnishes forth few inmates of our prisons, and bestows advantages of education, surroundings and associates which should increase the capacity of sound judgment. Whether in administration itself or in the selection of a governing body, knowledge, integrity, and sound judgment are the indispensable factors which no skilful accommodation of competing interests -this accommodation being the creeping paralysis of good government to which democratic rule is peculiarly susceptible can replace. But the measures of a wide enfranchisement have swept away the virtually exclusive claim of property; and their concomi

tants of State-aided, State-directed education and a cheap Press have promoted a specious knowledge and shallow judgment which spell a far-reaching change of conditions. The political knowledge which is influential at an election crisis is the average of the knowledge of an ill-educated electorate, and the judgment of affairs which such an electorate accepts is as a rule mainly an er parte advocacy. And therefore to increase the elective power of the man of wider range and outlook than is within the purview of the man in the street is a counterbalance to the real danger of that little knowledge which its possessor believes to be omniscience. We have of course accepted this principle in the Universities' franchise, and it is significant that this franchise is one which the party in power is most anxious to destroy. But it is doubtful if the principle is sufficiently widely applied. Belgium's addition of a professional qualification is in the right direction. It cannot be too much emphasized that whereas integrity, by the dispensation of Providence, may come by nature, knowledge and sound judgment of affairs which such an elecditions, emphatically do not develop without labor and effort, and rarely without some favor of circumstance. The professional qualification involves. too, considerable contact with life and actual conditions. Belgium's other qualification for the plural vote-that of fatherhood-is characteristic of a healthy tendency, on the increase in modern life, to acknowledge the human factor in the State. Such a tendency is as remote from the despot's position that humanity is negligible as it is from the conception of the citizen as a mere party pawn.

This system of plural voting then, these additional qualifications for the exercise of the suffrage, are Belgium's contributions to the solving of that problem of representative government