2. The increasing influence of the party system has in England, and still more throughout the British Empire, singularly coincided with the growth of the moral influence exercisable by the Crown. From the accession of Victoria to the present day the moral force at the disposal of the Crown has increased. The plain truth is that the King of England has at the present day two sources of moral authority of which writers on the constitution hardly take enough account in regard to the future. The King, whoever he be, is the only man throughout the British Empire who stands outside, if not above, the party system. The King is, in lands outside the United Kingdom, the acknowledged, and indeed the sole, representative and centre of the Empire.118
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3. The last quarter of the nineteenth and, still more clearly, the first fourteen years of the twentieth century are, as already pointed out, marked by declining faith in that rule of law which in 1884 was one of the two leading principles of constitutional government as understood in England.
4. The various ideas for the improvement of the constitution which now occupy the minds of reformers or innovators are intended, at any rate, to provide against the unpopularity of legislation, but for the most part are hardly framed with the object of promoting the wisdom of legislation. No doubt some of these schemes may indirectly increase the chance that injudicious legislation may receive a check. Proportional representation may sometimes secure a hearing in the House of Commons for opinions which, though containing a good deal of truth, command little or comparatively little popularity. The referendum, it is hoped, may diminish the admitted and increasing evil of our party system. Still, as I have insisted, the main object aimed at by the advocates of political change is for the most part to ensure that legislation shall be in conformity with popular opinion.119
The conclusions I have enumerated are certainly calculated to excite anxiety in the minds of sensible and patriotic Englishmen. Every citizen of public spirit is forced to put to himself this question: What will be the outcome of the democratic constitutionalism now established and flourishing in England? He is bound to remember that pessimism is as likely to mislead a contemporary critic as optimism. He will find the nearest approach to the answer which his inquiry requires in a sermon or prophecy delivered in 1872 by a constitutionalist who even then perceived possibilities and perils to which forty-two years ago our leading statesmen were for the most part blind. Listen to the words of Walter Bagehot:
In the meantime, our statemen have the greatest opportunities they have had for many years, and likewise the greatest duty. They have to guide the new voters in the exercise of the franchise; to guide them quietly, and without saying what they are doing, but still to guide them. The leading statesmen in a free country have great momentary power. They settle the conversation
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of mankind. It is they who, by a great speech or two, determine what shall be said and what shall be written for long after. They, in conjunction with their counsellors, settle the programme of their party—the “platform,” as the Americans call it, on which they and those associated with them are to take their stand for the political campaign. It is by that programme, by a comparison of the programmes of different statesmen, that the world forms its judgment. The common ordinary mind is quite unfit to fix for itself what political question it shall attend to; it is as much as it can do to judge decently of the questions which drift down to it, and are brought before it; it almost never settles its topics; it can only decide upon the issues of these topics. And in settling what these questions shall be, statesmen have now especially a great responsibility if they raise questions which will excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise questions on which those orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise questions on which the interest of those orders is not identical with, or is antagonistic to, the whole interest of the State, they will have done the greatest harm they can do. The future of this country depends on the happy working of a delicate experiment, and they will have done all they could to vitiate that experiment. Just when it is desirable that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good issues, and only good issues, put before them, these statesmen will have suggested bad issues. They will have suggested topics which will bind the poor as a class together; topics which will excite them against the rich; topics the discussion of which in the only form in which that discussion reaches their ear will be to make them think that some new law can make them comfortable—that it is the present law which makes them uncomfortable—that Government has at its disposal an inexhaustible fund out of which it can give to those who now want without also creating elsewhere other and greater wants. If the first work of the poor voters is to try to create a “poor man’s paradise,” as poor men are apt to fancy that Paradise, and as they are apt to think they can create it, the great political trial now beginning will simply fail. The wide gift of the elective franchise will be a great calamity to the whole nation, and to those who gain it as great a calamity as to any.120
This is the language of a man of genius, who being dead yet speaketh. Whether the warning which his words certainly contain was unnecessary, or whether his implied prophecy of evil has not already been partially fulfilled or may not at some not distant date obtain more complete fulfilment, are inquiries which must be answered by the candour and the thoughtfulness of my readers. The complete reply must be left to the well-informed and more or less
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impartial historian, who in 1950 or in 2000 shall sum up the final outcome of democratic government in England. Still it may be allowable to an author writing in 1914, though more than half blinded, as must be every critic of the age in which he lives, by the ignorance and the partialities of his own day, to remember that the present has its teaching no less than the past or the future. National danger is the test of national greatness. War has its lessons which may be more impressive than the lessons, valuable as they always are, of peace. The whole of a kingdom, or rather of an Empire, united for once in spirit, has entered with enthusiasm upon an arduous conflict with a nation possessed of the largest and the most highly trained army which the modern world can produce. This is in itself a matter of grave significance. England and the whole British Empire with her have taken up the sword and thereby have risked the loss of wealth, of prosperity, and even of political existence. And England, with the fervent consent of the people of every land subject to the rule of our King, has thus exchanged the prosperity of peace for the dangers and labours of war, not for the sake of acquiring new territory or of gaining additional military glory, for of these things she has enough and more than enough already, but for the sake of enforcing the plainest rules of international justice and the plainest dictates of common humanity. This is a matter of good omen for the happy development of popular government and for the progress, slow though it be, of mankind along the path of true fortitude and of real righteousness. These facts may rekindle among the youth of England as of France the sense that to be young is very heaven; these facts may console old men whom political disillusion and disappointment which they deem undeserved may have tempted towards despair, and enable them to rejoice with calmness and gravity that they have lived long enough to see the day when the solemn call to the performance of a grave national duty has united every man and every class of our common country in the determination to defy the strength, the delusions, and the arrogance of a militarised nation, and at all costs to secure for the civilised world the triumph of freedom, of humanity, and of justice.
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