an experience of violent and of reasonable methods far deeper than that of the impetuous demagogues of to-day.
Revolutions Superfluous and Unjustifiable.
If we lived under a theocracy, autocracy, or oligarchy, or even under the constitution of the United States, there might be some justification for violent measures; but how can violence be justified when the people are able to get the government they want every three years, or even within a single year? If there is anything unsatisfactory in the written constitution under which we live, the people can amend it to their own liking, subject only to approved safeguards against ill-considered tampering. All that is needed is that the people shall make up their minds. In Great Britain and the Dominions the political sovereign is public opinion.
The time has not yet come when the world can hope to dispense with war between one nation and another; the League of Nations and the International Court of Arbitration are only in their infancy. But the time has come when everyone of the self-governing nations under the British flag may decide that civil war shall be a thing of the past. The great purpose of constitutional machinery is to enable us to. attain by regular, orderly methods what the world has been accustomed to get by violence. I do not say that there will never be civil war again in the British Dominions. I do say that there is no need for it, and that there is nothing which we can hope to attain by war within the State that cannot be secured more thoroughly and permanently by making use of the Constitution that our forefathers have handed down to us.
