from the old. The old constituencies stop-| archy is to them a fact, not a dispensation. ping short below the small shopkeepers, just They are not disaffected towards the Contook in the classes who form a recognised stitution, but they have no vital and saving part of the social body from the capitalist faith in it, and they never will have. They point of view. They all had, and they were accept the status quo, and that is the end of there by virtue of having, at least some small it. The Church and the rest in the same amount of realised wealth. They all em- manner. The beautiful mechanism of our ployed some others. They all belonged to glorious Constitution; the subtler mysteries the officer class of the social army, even of our administrative and parliamentary orthough the bulk were only sergeants or cor- ganism; the wheels within wheels of selfporals. They all had a native veneration government, which our cheesemonger feels for property, and all notions, superstitious down to the sacred independence of his own or rational, which our social history has ac- weights and measures; the grand ideal of cumulated round that idea. You could not the parish; the knotted torso of our colossal point the moral of a duke's deer-forest with- law; and all that which culminates in the out making the cheesemonger wince. jury-box of our Saxon ancestors, these are venerable things which he half-admires and half-wonders at, like the objects of antiquity in the British Museum, understanding here and there. They are things which he has never been called upon practically to work, and of which he has never in person realised the blessings. Thus he has none of our cheesemonger's abiding sense of personal interest in the "system." He accepts the system, but he is not of it. The " system," if you come to argue it, is with him an open question.

All this is changed now in the constituencies. There is now not only a large number, but a large majority of the electors who have no property at all. Many of them have not half-a-crown on a Saturday morning. They are simply full privates in the rank and file, and not even corporals. They employ no one, but are all employed by others. They never have been admitted as full members of the responsible part of society. The theory has been, that the State took care of them; not that they took care of the State. They would talk over the duke's deer-forest upon general principles, as they might discuss Divine Right or the feudal system, without any sense of profanity or indecorum in handling such a delicate topic. It is a wild calumny in those who pretend that the working classes are hostile to the institution of property, or will destroy it the moment they obtain the power. They have a deep and healthy respect for it in itself-indeed, a truer and nobler sense of its functions than any other class, for they recognise its duties. But the gross superstition in which its worship is surrounded here they do not share, that superstition which Mr. Mill so justly finds to be barely intelligible. They venerate property; but they venerate still more social well-being, of which it is the creature and the instrument. They have never been reared in that fierce, jealous, absorbing, and blind devotion to property, in all its accidents and phases, as a holy and ineffable mystery, such as we find it in those who have breathed from childhood the aristocratic or commercial atmosphere of this island. They have not been nursed from their cradles in the ever-present sense of its beneficent mercies. To acquire the true British dogged instinct of property you must be, as it were, "to the manner born."

As it is with property, so it is with the other grand pillars of our social system. The working classes have a real regard for our Queen; but, as an institution, the mon

Now the want of a very definite enthusiasm for the British constitution would not be of any singular importance if the moral and intellectual tone of the new electors was at all the same as that of the old. But it.is utterly unlike it. There is no greater break in our class hierarchy than that between the lowest of the propertied classes and the highest of the non-propertied classes. In all that makes political force, in breadth of view, in power of combination, in social spirit, and in loyalty to their leaders, the latter are immeasurably superior. It is just this immense difference in moral qualities between the two which men persist in forgetting. The trader, whatever his rank in his own class, by the conditions of his life is absorbed in petty economic details, is harassed by the anxieties of traffic, trained to ceaseless competition, jealous, cautious, self-contained, and intensely and narrowly practical. These are just the qualities which make the fortunes, but unmake the politician. What helpless puppets in Parliament are those keen men of business, whose wary genius has amassed fortunes! What a spectacle of mean stupidity is the typical cheesemonger crowing on his own vestry! The workman, whatever his rank in his own order, is just the reverse, -imprudent, generous, social, and imaginative. The only occupation for his brain is the study of public questions; his only strength is in combination; his ignorance of all the in

to the English as much as to any.

is middle class-but eminently English, if it is possible to be at once English and republican. In spite of all the merriment which it may occasion to some sprightly persons, I deliberately repeat that the upper

stincts and habits of business makes him belongs to the democracy of Europe, and prone to visions, Utopias, doctrines; whilst his moral nature having no true opening ex- The English democracy, in fact, are cept in domestic and social feeling, his acutely susceptible of ideas—indeed, are whole strength is given to unreflective and the only large class in England who are unsystematised ideas. Half the bitterness - and capable of heartily combining to with which the battle of Unionism rages be- carry those ideas into practical result. tween the employing and employed classes But it is not merely a capacity for ideas: is due to the fact that the workman cannot it is a capacity for generous sentiments conceive men seriously choosing to live un- which marks their aim. The ideas which der the system of competition, and the dominate them are ideas of social good, capitalist cannot conceive men honestly pre- of a higher order of life, of mutual help. ferring the rule of combination. Both sys- not always very wise, but usually vigortems and both these characters have their ous. Along with this is a spontaneous great merits, and both are indispensable to turn for combination, organisation, and adthe welfare of society. But political vigour hesion to leaders, a quality eminently belongs to the social, and not to the indi-un-English, if nothing is English but what vidual type. The workmen of course have their special failings, looseness of thought, credulity, ignorance, and a naïf readiness to settle things off hand which makes thoughtful men shudder. These would make them very orders of the workmen possess higher and bad administrators or senators, no doubt. But they are not exactly political weaknesses. On the contrary, they just lead them to that temper of enthusiasm, energy, and faith in themselves which makes a set of men formidable. The result is that they are fired by ideas to a degree that no other class in the community are; and then they act with a decision which is startling to men accustomed to the intricacies of business. In place of that stony impenetrability to mere doctrines which marks the whole business class, the workmen have an overabundant proneness to them. It is the fashion to talk of the English impatience of mere ideas, and this phrase is just an instance of this stony impenetrability itself. It is the mark of the governing classes and the commercial classes proper, and of them alone. The great English brains, the poets, the thinkers, and the moralists are pre-eminently gifted with ideas, and the bulk of the English people have at least their fair share. The typical wooden "practical" man represents only about a tenth of our people,just the classes which have been saturated with Constitutionalism and Protestantism. The brains and the hands are perfectly free both from cause and effect. When the practical Englishman stumbles against what he concludes is an idea, he at once cries out that it is a French importation, just as the Times denounces amorcellement (sic) if any one speaks of the land. The capacity for political ideas is not French, it is only democratic. We call it French because the democracy in France is more in the ascendant than here. But it

stronger social capabilities than any other class. This is not identical with political wisdom, but it is identical with political force. This is really a matter on which mere literary criticism can give us nothing but bons mots. Those only who have known in personal friendship the better as well as the average men of this order can fairly estimate their value. The conditions of public agitation in England are unusually dangerous to the prominent agitators of all classes, and the working class, like the rest, would suffer unjustly, if judged by all those who profess to speak in their name. It is usual, moreover, to forget how completely the artificial training of the educated public imposes a conventional restraint of manner on all that they do, and that uneducated workmen are wholly unskilled in the art of casting a plausible veil over their weaknesses. The jealousies, the vanity, the intrigues to which statesmen give high constitutional names, are seen in the people in their crude and naked deformity. Nothing but long habit and study can enable us truly to estimate a class which society regards in effect as something like another nation or race. And opinions not based on such knowledge are epigrams, but they are not evidence.

It is this proneness to general ideas, this instinct of falling into discipline, and active sympathy with leaders, which marks off the workman so distinctly from the shopkeeper. They differ more completely than men in the same nation living side by side often do. Consider the intense enthusiasm which men like Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and

Mr. Mill awaken in the mind of the work- | same, but the system will be essentially ing class. It may give them some day a modified, and subject to very new and reforce before which the vestries will wither markable impulses. up like tow. The writer was the other day In fact, the change which has been made exploring a coal mine, and chancing to ask is one which, from its nature, cannot be some grimy bare colliers, hewing away in immediately tested. It is not that a great the dim air, in what part of the workings revolution has been effected, but that great we were, they told him with some pride possibilities of revolution have. Until the that they called it the "Mill End," after fountains of the great deep are opened, all the member for Westminster. A trifle this, will remain very much as before. Power but a matter for thought, that those rough and wealth will control elections; the rich hewers, groping all their night of days in governing class will furnish nineteen-twenthose choking cells of coal could be think-tieths of the members. The corrupt boring of the author of a "System of Logic" and of the pamphlet on the Condition of Ireland.

Again, the argument respecting the residuum must not be pushed too far. No doubt the lower strata of the new constituencies, chiefly in the small boroughs, have very dubious political virtues, and may for one or two elections prove very tractable indeed. But what a fool's paradise to trust in as a permanence! As the small constituencies are disfranchised, and the growth of education advances, and the power of the working class becomes consolidated, it is inevitable that workmen of all classes will more or less amalgamate. In ordinary times there would be much to keep them distinct. Great is beer, especially seductive whilst men are tolerably comfortable and have bread to eat with the beer. But let us see a great national panic or passion; wait till some fixed idea seizes on the popular mind like a religion, and where will the power of beer be then?

The desperate attempt of the opponents of Unionism to stir up the lower strata of workmen against the higher has proved a complete failure. It is very well for the governing classes to rely on the residuum now, but what will it be when the people are violently aroused-the time when you really want your residuum? King Bomba relied on his residuum-the lazzaroni of Naples; and they did him good service before the earth began to rock beneath him. But on which side were the lazzaroni when Garibaldi came ?

oughs, the bribery system, the nominee system, the jobbing system will perish hard and slowly. Rank will exert its time-honoured spell, petty interests will divide constituencies as of old, and Beer will be king time and again. The Millennium that the Radical hails, the Chaos that the Tory dreads, are alike the creation of delusion or of panic. The whole thing is in embryo as yet. The workmen are capable of great transforming ideas, it is true; but the ideas are not forthcoming-they have yet to be framed, or at least to be promulgated. They have a great sense of adhesion to their chiefs; but great revolutionary chiefs are in their cradles or at school. The workmen have a native instinct for vigorous action. But the social force of Conservatism is at present quite paramount. Hence, with ideas still incoherent and unset, without immediate leaders of any genius, and a dense phalanx of material opposition before them, the new electors are certainly not likely to sweep the board; and to all appearance we may say that nothing is changed, but that there are a million of new electors, more or less-nothing, that is to say, on the surface.

Has nothing, then, been done? and have the rhetoric and the vigils of so many sessions been in vain? Yes! an immense work has been done. By transposing the legal balance of power from the wagespaying to the wages-earning class, a great moral change has been effected. The new power will slowly consolidate and feel its strength, and will be long in doing so. This being true of the new electors, the But in the meantime the barriers and outold ways of managing constituencies must works which fenced about the arcana of be somewhat revised. All the old influ- State are gone. The veil of the temple ences of self-interest, habit, prestige, great (reared by the Whigs in '88) has been rent as they will be, will not carry the weight asunder, and priests, acolytes, and worthey have hitherto done. The governing shippers are mingled together in a mass. classes will have to learn a new style of The elaborate system of checks and countergoverning. In stepping from the wages- checks by which the great and good men giving to the wages-receiving class, they who have governed us for two centuries have passed into a new moral and social kept public opinion at bay is all gone, at atmosphere. The old principles of human any rate in strictness of law. Through nature and our social order will be the what a jungle of public meetings, of depu

their heads to move; beside which, it is an instrument that they dare not in practice rely on. A few redcoats may be called on to suppress a vulgar riot; but the first blood of the people shed by troops in a really popular cause would, as we all know, make the Briton boil in a very ugly manner. There are only the police, hardly a match for the "roughs," as we know to our cost. The Government would be mad which seriously attempted to face an angry people on the strength of seven thousand police staves. It was very easy to abuse an unlucky set of ministers about Hyde Park. But what were they to do? To have used the army would have been the end of the British constitution. There were seven thousand policemen, but what are they among so many? The Executive in this country has absolutely nothing to fall back upon but the special constable, the moral support of the cheesemonger and the pork-butcher. Real and powerful so long as the pork-butcher is in good humour. But wait till the windows of the pork-shop are being smashed, and all about a quarrel to keep you in office, and you will see the ungrateful pork-butcher turn and rend you like one of his own herd.

is no force to appeal to. Hence it comes that so many proud fortresses of Conservatism have been surrendered at discretion by commanders who felt with a pang that their magazines were absolutely empty. During the American war the Northern armies were long kept at bay by some tremendous earthworks bristling with cannon. One night the trenches were silently evacuated, and the terrible pieces were found to be painted wood. So for years the governing classes had kept Democracy at bay behind some imposing ramparts. But one day the Reform League discovered that they were mounted with canvas and logs.

So that however feeble the forces of progress may be, they can hardly be feebler than those of Conservatism. But this feebleness in material strength is nothing to the feebleness of motive principles and ideas. In the days of Burke or Pitt, nay, of Castlereagh and Canning, there was a potent and deep enthusiasm for the system as a whole, and a real faith of its resting on truth and reason. Who has any enthusiasm for the system now? A few clever men find their account in defending it with purely professional zeal. But as a rule the men Executive system (if system it can be of brain are heartily weary and ashamed of called) is in this country so utterly dis- it. In fact, the intellectual class is corjointed and weak that its material forces in dially disaffected. They despise the whole resistance are almost nothing. Property apparatus, they dislike it intensely, and they has, no doubt, an enormous social and resent its thrall. The constitutional, Promoral vis inertiæ. But Government, as testant, mercantile imposture they can in such, has singularly small material forces. their hearts endure no more. The religion Our greatest soldier in this age saw it per- of Parliament, Bible, and Free Trade has fectly, and so did Lord Derby last year. degenerated into a self-seeking cant. They The fact is that our political organism of feel in how many things this system falls the constitutional type was based on a to- short of much that is seen in every contitally different theory from that of force at nental system, how much more it falls short all. The governing classes never pretended of any decent ideal. It is this stony imto rely on force. They trusted to maintain penetrability to ideas, of which the British their supremacy by their social power, and middle class have made a sort of gospel, and their skill in working the machine. Local in which the aristocratic class (who ought to self-government, representation of the peo- know better) please to encourage them, that ple, civil liberty, was all the cry, until at so revolts a man of any cultivation and a last the tone of English public life became grain of imagination. Where is such an one saturated with ideas of rule by consent, and to be found, not absolutely absorbed in polnot by force. Very excellent theories-itics or business, who is not visibly mocking but you must abide by them, and never at the whole apparatus in his heart? A dream of force, for you have cut yourself lively writer of this class has opportunely off from the right to appeal to it. The least transplanted the German name of Philissuggestion of force puts the governing class- tine. This happily describes that insurreces in an outrageously false position, and arrays against them all the noble sentiments of liberty on which they based their own title to rule. Club blusterers jeering at trades' unionists in Pall Mall may talk about If there be anything in this, it is clear grapeshot and dragoons, but men with heads that the rule of this country will have shortly on their shoulders know that an appeal to to be carried on under very altered condiforce would be the end of English society; and tions. There is nothing to drive any one what is even more to the purpose, that there into a paroxysm of alarm. It would be

tion of the brain against the official and mercantile thrall which has driven those who believe in the force of ideas into closer sympathy with the people.