to the popular voice. In such cases, the love of routine, the narrow and rigid views, the personal interest, ambition, or indolence of officials and representatives are likely enough to impede and retard, to mislead, pervert, and corrupt the national action. In executive details, meantime, what choice have we but to trust to individuals? A crowd of voters cannot easily study, cannot readily appreciate, the subtle and intricate circumstances which embarrass the application of principles. A complex question in arithmetic is better submitted to the computation of an accountant than to the suffrages of a town-meeting. Accountants and auditors may combine. to deceive, but the chances of their telling the truth are greater than those of our carrying it by acclamation. A people also, we conceive, however generous and well-meaning, is apt to be a little too rough-handed to deal properly with nice points of fairness and honor, and delicate questions of feeling.

A second chapter, on Liberty, the supposed principle, is followed by a third, on the projected perfect practice of it in the Universal Republic. The writer urges, with reason, that the existence of government at all presupposes a certain surrender of some portion of their freedom to do whatever they please, upon the part of those who live under it. Upon any other theory, how strange and anomalous, for example, is that constraint which, in the freest of all polities, restricts the free-will of the citizen, by requiring his submission to the vote of a majority. This regulation, he argues, all political regulations, all institutions and constitutions whatever, are not in themselves principles; they are, at their very best, extremely imperfect human expedients for attaining, in a rough way, some amount, often a very small one, of practicable common benefit. Universal suffrage is one social method, monarchy is another; as the former is sometimes best, so also sometimes is the latter. Universal suffrage would hardly do on shipboard; the rule of one is unsuitable for a club. There are times. when a state is very much like a club; there are occasions when it may fitly be compared to a ship.

There can be no doubt that a republican form of government, such na we enjoy, is the most productive of happiness to our people; but this depends alone on the fact of their general moral and intellectual

education. If we become as a nation corrupted and ignorant, no worse form of government can be imagined than ours must then become; for it would be the irresistible despotism of a majority of corrupt and ignorant men. No greater evil could fall upon India than the establishment of a Hindu republic. It would bring no good, no liberty, but would burden the people with intolerable calamities and oppression. Even were the present absolute government of the country by the English as bad as its enemies assert, it would be vastly preferable to a native democracy. And yet, in these violent, unthinking times, a government in which all power is vested in the hands of the people is declared to possess an inherent and divine virtue.

"But, it is urged, every man can judge what is best for himself better than it can be judged for him, and in a republic every man has, or should have, a voice in the government. Let us, however, look into this last assertion. Every man, it is true, may have a vote under a republic; but there must be a majority and a minority, and every republic is founded on the principle of the rule of the majority. Universal suffrage is claimed by the doctrinaires of republicanism as being the means of giving the fullest expression to the will of the majority. Without entering into the question whether universal suffrage is the best means to this end, which is very doubtful, it is desirable to examine into the right of a majority to rule, and to see whether it has any natural virtue; or whether it is, like all other human rule, a simple expedient, good under some circumstances, bad under others.

"Suppose, for instance, that a question were to arise in a state, where an absolute majority was the ruling power, of the highest consequence to the welfare of the community. Two parties exist, opposed to each other. The vote is taken, and the numbers are found to be exactly equal. A majority of numbers being required, neither of these parties can enforce their will upon the other. But suppose that, instead of being balanced, two thirds of the votes are given on one side, and one third on the other; but the smaller party is composed of the wise and intelligent men of the state, while the larger is made up of the unreflecting and passionate mass of the people. Is there any inherent right, any real authority, save that of conventional prescription, which is to enforce the dictates of folly over the convictions of wisdom?

"The case has been well stated by an able writer:-'A mere preponderance of numbers by no means implies preponderance either of capacity, of good intention, or even of strength. Wisdom generally lies with the minority; fairness often, power not unfrequently. There is, and can be, no law of nature, no axiom of eternal morals, in virtue 10 VOL. LXXVII. NO. 160.

of which three foolish men are entitled to bind and overpower two wise men, or three weak men two strong men.'

"Nor is this the testimony only of abstract reasoning: it is the practical conclusion of even the most ardent supporters of the most democratic theories. In the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man,' Robespierre declares: 'Aucune portion du peuple ne peut exercer la puissance du peuple entier.' And in a speech before the Convention, on the 28th of December, 1792, he broke forth with the words: 'La vertu fut toujours en minorité sur la terre.'

"It was the act of the majority which doomed Socrates to death, and Aristides to banishment. It was the act of the majority which has established the present arbitrary ruler in France. Of all tyranny, that of the majority has been the most fearful.

"And, in truth, the rule of a majority in a state can be tolerable only when the people has reached such a degree of intelligence and selfcontrol that it is guided in its decisions by a sense of justice, and recognizes its responsibilities to be commensurate with its authority. Otherwise, all good is left to chance, while much evil is certain.

The conclusions, then, upon which we must rest, are, that no form of government possesses any inherent virtue; that liberty may be developed under one, as under another; that that government is to be preferred which best secures to its subjects the means of progress in liberty; that these means may be secured under any form, but would be for the most part absent from a universal republic." pp. 43-48.

Before quitting these chapters we must add a few words on Liberty.

The dream and aspiration of the ardent and generous spirits of our time is for a certain royal road to human happiness. Disappointed a thousand times, they still persist in their exalted creed that there must and will be here on earth, if not now, in some future and approaching time, a state of social arrangements in which the spontaneous action and free development of each individual constituent member will combine to form "a vast and solemn harmony," the ultimate perfect movement of collective humanity. There beautiful thoughts will distil as the dew, and fair actions spring up as the green herb; there, without constraint, we shall all be good, and without trouble, happy; there, what in its imperfect form is vice, shall gently and naturally flower out into virtue; there contention and contest, control and commandment, will be the obsolete

terms of a dead language, with no modern equivalents to explain them. A divine interior instinct will intimate to each single human being his fittest and highest vocation, and will prompt and inspire and guide him to fulfil it; while in the pursuit of his own free choice, and in the fulfilment of his own strongest desires, he will, by the blessing of the presiding genius of humanity, best serve the true interests of Society and the Race.

Was it not thus long ago? For,

"Ante etiam sceptrum Dictæi regis, et ante
Impia quam cæsis gens est epulata juvencis,
Aureus hanc vitam in terris Saturnus agebat."

O blessed ages of pure, spontaneous, unconscious, unthinking, unreasoning life and action, to you, either in the past or the future, the human heart is still fain to recur- still must dream, even though it be but a dream, of how sweet it were to grow as the green herb, and bloom as the spring flowers, to be good because we cannot be otherwise, and happy because we cannot help it. O blessed ages, indeed! But have such, since men were men, ever been? Or are such, while men are men, ever likely to come? Alas, the rude earth itself affords us admonition,

"Pater ipse colendi

Haud facilem esse viam voluit, primusque per artem,
Movit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda,
Nec torpere gravi passus sua regna veterno."

And, strange as it may seem,
taneity, still those who have
deal also to say in favor of it.

how charming soever be sponendured coercion find a good

"O Life! without thy chequered scene

Of right and wrong, of weal and woe,
Success and failure, - could a ground
For magnanimity be found,

For faith, mid ruined hopes serene?
Or whence could virtue flow?"

There are many, surely, who, looking back into their past lives, feel most thankful for those acts which came least from their own mere natural volition can see that what did them most good was what they themselves would least have

chosen; that things which, in fact, they were forced to, were, after all, the best things that ever happened to them. There are some, surely, who have had reason to bless a wholesome compulsion; there are some who prefer doing right under a master to doing nothing but enjoy themselves as their own masters; who, rather than be left to their own unaided feebleness, hesitation, and indolence, would voluntarily, for their own and the common good, enter a condition of what thenceforth would be "involuntary servitude." The mature free will of the grown man looks back, undoubtedly, with some little regret, but also with no little scorn, upon the bygone puerile spontaneities of the time when he did as he liked.

There are periods, it is true, in the life of the individual human being, and perhaps of the collective human race, when expansion is the first of necessities. Such, it is possible, may be the present. But because we would be rid of existing restrictions, it does not follow that restriction of all kinds is an evil;- because our present house is too small for us, it is not to be inferred that we shall live henceforth in the open air.

As a general rule of life and conduct, we see as yet no reason to believe that liberty, if this be its meaning, is better than service. It does not seem to be established that the system on which the things we live amongst were arranged, is that of spontaneous development, rather than of coercion met by a mixture of resistance and submission. The latter hypothesis seems intrinsically as much more elevating as the other does more agreeable. Meantime, as a matter of language, we should be inclined to reject altogether this modern sense of our old established word Liberty. If the new theory wants a name, let it find a new one. It will but perplex and cheat us by claiming one already otherwise appropriated. When we hear people demanding liberty, we shall consider them to express their desire, not for the golden age, but either for release from some particular form of restriction, or, it may be, for a less degree of restriction in general. Liberty for us will mean either more liberty, just as in the Black Hole of Calcutta, "air" meant "more air," — or distinct emancipation, for example, from personal slavery, or from foreign rule. Liberty in itself is but the power of doing what we please; a power