unaccountable aberration from sobriety in the minds of the working class. On the contrary, if we take into account the whole course of the labour movement, not only in England, but on the Continent, we shall rather be inclined to judge that the exceptional phenomenon is the individualist position known as the 'old unionism.' For, as we have already observed in detail, in the earlier years of the century there appeared, as an immediate result of the industrial revolution, an agitation essentially akin to that of our own time, though far less effective and intelligent, whose object was to secure for the working class the control of political power as the preliminary means to a social transformation. Extinguished for a time in England by the collapse of Chartism, the movement blazes out into conspicuous life upon the Continent. It was the soul of the French revolution of 1848. Shot down at the barricades in the days of June, stifled into silence under the empire, almost exterminated in the massacres that accompanied the fall of the Paris Commune, it is asserting itself at this moment in France through the most consistent and pertinacious of her everfluctuating factions. In Germany, whence it received its most complete and definite formula, it is increasing in power and numbers every year. In Belgium it has almost extinguished the Liberal party. And the English working class, in adopting it again, after the interval of a generation, with

wider knowledge and with clearer aims, are merely bringing themselves into line with the normal development of the century. In so doing they are giving their reply, in no uncertain terms, to the question, What is the meaning of democracy? The governing classes, as we saw, for the last seventy years, have been deliberately abdicating their position, without ever forming any clear conception of the movement in which they have allowed themselves to be involved. But the mass of the people into whose hands, in the course of devolution, the government will fall, are daily becoming more and more aware of what they mean to do with their power. The working class is ranging itself against the owners of land and capital. The nation is dividing into two antagonistic sections, and it is to one of these sections, that which is numerically the larger, that must fall, according to the democratic theory of government, the absolute monopoly of power. It is in this situation that resides the political problem of the English democracy, a problem which it will be the object of the following chapter to examine more nearly.

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CHAPTER V

THE PRESENT SITUATION

HAVING now briefly traced the process of the democratisation of Parliament, and having indicated the main issue, in domestic politics, which the process has brought into prominence, I propose, in the present chapter, to offer certain considerations upon the central machinery of Government in connection with the socialistic tendencies which have just been examined.

The conception of a fundamental division of society into the two antagonistic classes of labourers and capitalists, or, more generally, of the poor and the rich, admits, I am aware, of only a limited application; but as it is the basis of revolutionary socialism, it may be interesting to examine its bearing on the theory of democratic government. The aim of the modern socialists, as we have seen, is to develop to its logical conclusion the political machinery of democracy, and then to utilise it to effect a social revolution. Universal suffrage, payment of members and of election expenses out of public funds, and the abolition of the House of Lords, would give, it is supposed, to the more

numerous of the two classes into which, on this hypothesis, the nation is divided, the unconditional and absolute control of the legislature; they would therefore be able to effect, without further difficulty or scruple, a fundamental change in the tenure of property.

Stated thus crudely and frankly, but not, as I believe, unfairly, this conception appears to me to be a reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory of democracy, so far as it is held in any absolute sense. It is not true, and it never has been and never will be true, that the majority have either the right or the power to do anything they choose, in defiance of the claims or the wishes of the minority; and if ever a serious attempt were to be made to carry out the policy of the Socialists, the only result would be the breakdown of government altogether. Government by the majority is a convenient means of conducting national affairs, where and in so far as there is a basis of general agreement deeper and more persistent than the variations of surface opinion; but as soon as a really fundamental point is touched, as soon as a primary instinct, whether of self-preservation or of justice, begins to be seriously and continuously outraged, the democratic convention gives way. No minority, for example, even in a compact modern State, either would or ought to submit to a decision of the majority to prohibit the exercise of their religion. Such a decision could only be

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carried into effect by force, subject to the contingency of armed rebellion; and orderly government would dissolve into veiled or open civil war. Similarly, and in spite of the optimism of Home Rulers, it is perfectly possible that in the case of a population as heterogeneous as that of Ireland, the attempt to introduce the system of government by the majority might really drive the minority to rebellion.

It is the presupposition of all democratic government that certain principles, tacitly understood if not precisely formulated, will in practice be observed by any party that may be in power. Such a principle, in the present condition of society, is undoubtedly the rule on which every man relies that private property shall not be appropriated by the State, except for what are generally recognised to be desirable public ends, and on the payment of a reasonable compensation. And, in my opinion, the realisation of the political ideal of the extremer Socialists, and the attempt by that particular method to effect a social revolution, without any fair consideration for the claims of owners of property, would simply result in the collapse of the whole convention on which the possibility of government depends.

Let us turn, however, from this somewhat abstract possibility, to the actual condition of affairs in England.

In the last chapter we were led to a general