prophetic, the inevitable consequence of the follies of 1867 and 1884.
"The effect" (he wrote) "of the virtually English discovery of government by Representation was to diminish the difficulties of popular government in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions. But this famous system is evidently in decay through the ascendency over it which is being gradually obtained by the vulgar assumption that great masses of men can directly decide all necessary questions for themselves." ..."The delusion that democracy, when it has once had all things put under its feet, is a progressive form of government, lies deep in the convictions of a particular political school. But there can be no delusion grosser. It receives no countenance from experience or from probability."
. . . "We may say generally that the gradual establishment of the masses in power is of the blackest omen for all legislation founded on scientific opinion, which requires tension of mind to understand it, or self-denial to submit to it." . . . "Perhaps we are not at liberty to forget that there are two kinds of bribery. It can be carried on by patronising or giving to expectant partisans places paid out of the taxes, or it may consist in the directer process of legislating away the property of one class and transferring it to another. It is this last which is likely to be the corruption of these latter days. . . ."We are drifting towards a type of government associated with terrible events—a single Assembly, armed with full powers over the Constitution, which it may exercise at pleasure."
The warnings of the wise, the experience of Greece, of Rome, of mediæval Italy and modern France, are thrown away upon those who lust only for the spoils of the present.
