Parliamentary suffrage as not only safe, but a safeguard, the best pledge of social order.

To that opinion I still adhere. But yet I cannot deny that if I had written in the light of still more recent events, I should have been less confident in expressing it. One of the newest and ugliest features of our political life is the growth of a school professing principles far removed from any which have hitherto been accepted in England. It calls itself Liberal, but it is possessed by another spirit than that which has ever animated the great historic party known by the name. In my judgment, we owe to the Liberal party, directly or indirectly, every wise reform, every beneficial law, whereby our ancient institutions have been preserved and strengthened, during the last two centuries. To the action, the suffering, of that party we owe it, that British freedom has "slowly broadened down" from the Bill of Rights to the last Act for the removal of religious disabilities. But the Liberal party has until now accounted Rousseau the most dangerous foe to liberty. It has regarded his speculations with disgust, and their practical application by the Jacobins with abhorrence. The new school of Liberalism draws its inspiration from Rousseau, nay, openly professes his sophisms, and does not shrink from apologising for the most monstrous crimes of his disciples. It breathes the spirit of the Revolutionary dogma.

VII.] A NEW SCHOOL IN BRITISH POLITICS. 203

Heine tells us, in one of his letters, that an Englishman loves liberty like his lawful wife. But the doctrinaires, of whom I speak, seek to persuade him to give her a bill of divorcement, and to take in her place a Goddess of Reason à la française.

Unquestionable is it that the new gospel has made a certain number of converts among us, and that not exclusively from the filth of the world, the offscouring of all men, whose enthusiasm for it is intelligible enough. There are among its proselytes those whose characters are unstained, whose standing in society and in public life is assured, of whom we can by no means say, as of the rank and file of the Jacobin host, "guarda e passa." Perhaps we should not err in regarding Mr. Gladstone as the most notable of these.* It is interesting to observe how this eminent person, once "the rising hope of stern and unbending Tories," has gradually gravitated to the party of Revolution. There can indeed be no question of his natural dispositions for the new faith. He is fond of claiming for himself consistency in his public career. And, however erratic that career may seem, superficially considered, this claim will bear examination.

"We are changed by slow degrees,

All but the basis of the soul."

* Of course I do not mean that Mr. Gladstone, like Mr. John Morley, adopts the whole Revolutionary Credo. We must account of him as a proselyte of the gate": as a Girondist, rather than a Jacobin.

66

That abides. Mr. Gladstone has not essentially altered since 1839. Half a century has but ripened it him those qualities which Lord Macaulay then discerned with admirable clearness of vision, and delineated with no less admirable power of language. As I turn over the pages of that famous essay, and read of "the fatal facility with which Mr. Gladstone multiplies expressions stately and sonorous, but of indeterminate meaning," of "his delight in propositions of vast and indefinite extent," which, when tested by "a very few of the particulars included in them, we find false and extravagant," of his tendency "to escape from the legitimate consequences of his false principles, under cover of equally false history "—I feel that I might be listening to a candid account of his recent speeches. When I am told that "whatever Mr. Gladstone sees is refracted or distorted by a false medium of passions and prejudices," that the doctrines which he advocates are "such, as, if followed out in practice to their legitimate consequences, would inevitably produce the dissolution of society," that the principle laid down by him as to the function of government, will assuredly lead the statesman who acts upon it "to debase and enfeeble the community which he governs from a nation into a sect," there arises before me the depressing vision of the octogenarian statesman, devoting his last days to setting "the masses" against "the classes," "6

em

VII.]

MOB WORSHIP.

205

ploying all his remaining strength in inflaming the worst passions of mankind.” *

The sovereignty of the masses-not the sovereignty of the people, which is quite another thing, for the masses are not the people, nor the most important constituent thereof-is the principle upon which the new school of English Liberalism is founded the domination, not of the ethical idea, but of brute force. That nothing is sacred against the will of the numerical majority, miscalled the people, that it is the unique source of all power, of all right, that the only real crime is to gainsay its wishes such is their cardinal tenet. Hence their passionate contention that the wish of the majority ought always to prevail; in ignorance, or contempt of the elementary truths that the only ought is an ethical ought that the mere desire of a multitude of men, however large, is no more capable of giving birth to any right, than is the desire of the most foolish of the units of whom it is composed: that the moral value of a majority depends upon the moral value of the elements which constitute it. Hence their apologies for the most cowardly outbreaks of mob violence, for the most flagitious violations of the elementary principles of social

*The British Empire and other Essays, by Dr. Geffcken, p. 290. (Eng. Tr.)

order: * apologies usually conceived in the spirit of Robespierre's dictum: "Quand le peuple souverain, reprenant les pouvoirs qu'il a délégués, exerce son droit inaliénable, nous n'avons qu'à nous incliner." Hence the declaration made expressly by one of their humbler legislators, and, to say the least, insinuated by the most notable of their leaders, that no one need obey a law which he does not happen to like: a declaration which lays the brutal axe of Revolution to the very root of liberty: "to be free," said a great English judge, "is to live under a government by law." Hence the progress of the doctrine that economic suffering in any class constitutes a rightful claim to State relief: as though it were the function of government, in the words of the comic poet, τοῦ δήμου καταχεῖν ἀρυταίνῃ πλουθυγίειαν, Tλovovуíclav, to pour down upon the public, health and wealth with a soup ladle! Hence the constant tampering with the sanctity of contract

"the very foundation of modern society" as quack outbids quack in the House of Commons. Hence the ever-increasing degradation of that Assembly, "a body far too large for united counsel, and distracted in itself by factions, consecrated under the name of party." Hence the judgment of some of the most sagacious and sympathetic

*"Le vol et l'assassinat sont inclus dans les dogmes de la Révolution," M. Taine truly remarks (Origines de la France Contemporaine, vol. iii. p. 197).

†T. H. Green, Works, vol. iii. p. 382.