mains to be seen. The character of the people and the conditions under which they are to live will ultimately determine the nature of their working constitution. But it is certain that she will bring the executive more into harmony with the legislature. So will Russia, Austria, and Hungary.
For them the only way to this reform has been by revolution. Thanks to the Puritan leaders in the seventeenth century, and Whig statesmen in the eighteenth, we are more fortunate.
The Greatest Merit of the British Constitution.
One of the greatest merits of our working constitution—perhaps the greatest—is that direct action and revolution within the State are no longer necessary for any reform whatsoever. If the majority of the people are determined on change, there is no reason why they should not get it in a regular constitutional way, and that is infinitely better and more worthy of rational beings than having recourse to brute force and violence.
Apart from the suffering and slaughter of innocent beings, unavoidable in revolutions, victories won by force are not so enduring as those that come by reason and arbitration. Bismarck put his trust in blood and iron, and he was remarkably successful for a time. But what has become of his work now? I commend to you the advice of a greater builder of nations and empires than Bismarck. When his soldiers were clamouring for direct action in the middle of the seventeenth century Cromwell, the leader of the Ironsides who never lost a battle, said: "I could wish that we might remember this always, that what we gain in a free way, it is better than twice as much in a forced, and will be more truly ours and posterity's." Cromwell was no sentimentalist, he was speaking from experience—
