a reality by the side of an executive, whether hereditary or not, endowed with the requisite authority,-is the result of mutual forbearance, moderation, and respect; exists only by virtue of these qualities; could not endure for an hour without them. It is an entire mistake to imagine such a scheme theoretically good; it is, on the contrary, theoretically imperfect, and is feasible only on the supposition of additional elements, which are not "nominated in the bond." It is an entire mistake to affirm that English liberty has flourished in consequence of our glorious Constitution. English liberty has flourished in spite of our anomalous and defective Constitution; it has flourished in consequence of national virtues, in the absence of which that Constitution would have been utterly unmanageable. The machine which is supposed to have made us what we are, would have broken down generations ago, had we been other than what we are. It is full of checks and counter-checks, of anomalies and incongruities, which would seem to indicate its fitting place, as an unworking model, in a museum of monstrosities. The Monarch has the sole power of forming treaties, and of declaring peace and war. He alone commands the army. He alone appoints all functionaries, civil, military, and judicial. He can dissolve Parliament whenever it thwarts him, and as often as he pleases. He can put an absolute veto on all its enactments. He can suspend laws by orders in Council, if he can find Ministers bold enough to run the risk of a refusal on the part of Parliament to indemnify them afterwards. The House of Lords, or a majority of them, about 200 men, can snub both King and House of Commons, and stop all proceedings indefinitely, and paralyze the entire action of Government. Again, the House of Commons can release the army from their allegiance, by omitting to pass the yearly "Mutiny Bill." It can refuse the Monarch the means of carrying on the war which it yet empowers him to declare, and of paving the functionaries whom it yet authorizes him to appoint. It can impeach the Ministers whom it allows him to nominate; yet if they are condemned, it still leaves him the power of conferring immunity upon them by an unlimited prerogative of pardon. The Constitution gives the Monarch means of absolute despotism, if he is wicked enough to desire it, and if the army will stand by him, and if the people will endure military rule. It gives the nobles power to set both people and Monarch at defiance, if they are selfish and daring enough to do so. It gives the lower house the power of starving both its colleagues into a surrender, on the supposition that both its colleagues will keep within the limits of the law. But it proceeds throughout on the supposition that none of these things will occur; that their occurrence will be prevented by their possi

French Detestation of Compromise.

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bility; that none of the three parties will be forgetful of their duties, or be disposed to push their rights to an extreme; that each will bear and forbear; that all will join in masking the impossibilities of the constitution, and avoiding the collisions which its theory makes so easy; and that all, like the reverential children of the frail Patriarch of old, will concur in covering, with a decent and respectful drapery, the nakedness of their common parent.

But what would be the result were the English machine to be worked by French hands? Each of the three co-ordinate authorities would assert its power to the utmost. Each would

make use of its large portion to seize the whole. The Peers would put on the drag at the slightest opposition to their will. The Commons would stop the supplies on the most trivial provocation. The Sovereign would employ the army to levy the taxes and subdue the people. The Parliament would impeach the Minister, and the Monarch would insult and defy them by giving him a free pardon. The whole would be at a deadlock in a month. The opposing forces would substitute mutual antagonism for mutual control; and the result would be, not a diagonal as with us, but simply a checkmate-not a medial movement, but an absolute stoppage. The ultima ratio which we have staved off for centuries, would be reached by Frenchmen in a single session.-Representative Government, then, we say, embodies the essence, breathes the atmosphere, lives the life of COMPROMISE. But the French hate compromise. The very idea of it disgusts them. What they are, they like to be completely. What they have, they like to have to themselves, without colleague or without competitor. A possession which they hold only in concert, with equal co-proprietors, has few charms for them. The legitimists are unwilling to replace their Sovereign on the throne, on any basis but that of divine right, and absolute authority. In their notion he would be degraded if he owed his crown to the summons of the people, or shared his power with a new aristocracy, or a popular assembly. The bourgeoisie in like manner would ignore the nobles, and reduce them to a nullity. And the democracy, equally exclusive and intolerant, cannot imagine that the mass of the people can be rightfully called on to admit the existence or recognise the claims of any other party, and insist upon an exclusive, absolute, and uncontrolled dominion. Guizot, in his treatise on Democracy, seized this peculiarity of France with the quick instinct of a master's eye. "Peace is impossible," (he says, for the word peace we would substitute representative constitutionalism,) "so long as the various classes and political parties whom our society comprises, nourish the hope of mutu

ally destroying each other, and possessing an exclusive empire. This is the evil which, since 1789, torments us continually, and overthrows us periodically. The monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, have not accepted or recognised each other, but have toiled for their reciprocal exclusion. Constitution, laws, administration, have been in turn directed, like engines of war, to the destruction of one or other party. It has been a ( war to the knife,' in which neither of the combatants believed it possible to live if his rival was still erect and breathing by his side."

French exclusiveness and hatred of compromise, then, is the first reason why representative institutions have not flourished in France. But there is another and a yet deeper cause. Their revolutions have always begun at the wrong end. They have looked only to one point, and that not the primary, nor the most essential one. They have begun their reforms with institutions, not with individuals. They have thought it sufficient to reconstruct society in the aggregate, without modifying or amending the units which compose it. They forget in their earliest efforts, and have never paused to remember since, that the concrete mass must represent and resemble the materials of which it is made up; and that if the individuals are corrupt, selfish, violent, and impure, the community cannot be firm, peaceable, dignified, Accustomed to trace their evils to their Institutions, taught alike by their writers and their orators to cast upon empty forms the burden of their ingrained sins, they conceived that a change of institutions and of forms would work those miracles, which are the slow and painful product of private virtue and individual exertion; of patient toil, and more patient endurance-of mutual respect, and mutual love. They imagined they could reform society without first reforming themselves. Hence all their schemes and Constitutions have been projects for obtaining the reward without the effort the victory without the conflict or the sacrifice; for dispensing with indispensable qualifications in place of eliciting or exercising them; for doing great actions without first training great souls; for seeking in the barren and narrow range of the mechanical, what can only be found in the rich resources of the moral world. They worked for the salvation of the individual without requiring his participation in the task. Fatal blunder! They imagined that men might be rendered free and equal by destroying external barriers and striking off material chains; they did not perceive that freedom and equality have their sole roots and guarantees within the man. They abolished the ancien régime; but they abolished it in vain, while each man carried his ancien régime within himself. The old vices, the old corruption, the old

Bureaucracy Fatal to Republicanism.

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selfishness, the old ambition, the old passion for material enjoyments, the old incapacity for silent and elevated patriotism, still survived, and were never struck at or fairly encountered: how then should not the old anomalies re-appear? The garments were torn and buried; but the body and the life remained. Now, as surely as the laws of Providence are constant and inexorable, so surely can there be, for nation or for individual, no short cut to a goal which God has placed at the end of a toilsome and appointed path; no mechanical contrivances for the attainment of an end which is the allotted reward of moral effort and self-denying virtue; no human fiat for the gratuitous bestowal of blessings for which heaven has appointed a hard and heavy purchasemoney. The functions of government-self-government as well as every other demand qualifications, negative and positive, of no ordinary kind; qualifications which are not inherent or innate; qualifications for which the demand by no means always calls forth the supply. The mere possession of power confers neither capacity nor virtue to exercise it well; and in obtaining the representative institutions that belong to freedom, while still tainted with all the vices of their ancient servitude, the French only seized a treasure of which they had forgotten to secure the key, a weapon of which they had not learned the mastery, a writing in cypher to which they had not got the clue. Caution, humility, obedience to law, long-suffering patience, respect for others' rights, and others' opinions, these, the sine qua non of a constitutional régime, they never dreamed of practising;-aspiring to raise the superstructure, while shirking the preliminary drudgery of laying the foundation.

A third reason why parliamentary government, which has answered so well in England, has answered so ill in France, may be found in the fact, that it harmonizes with our habits and institutions, but is wholly discrepant and incongruous with those of our neighbours. We govern ourselves; they are governed by officials. Our whole system is municipal, theirs is bureaucratic. We have already spoken of their centralized administration, and the extent to which it pervades and interpenetrates the daily and domestic life of the nation. In England the civil servants of the government are few, unconnected, and unobtrusive; in France they are innumerable, omnipotent, and constitute a separate, organized, and powerful class. In England they confine themselves to absolutely necessary functions; in France they interfere with every transaction and every event of life. In England, as a general rule, a man is only reminded of their existence by the annual visit of the tax-gatherer, unless indeed he has to appeal to the law, or has rendered himself amenable to it; in France, scarcely a day passes, scarcely an operation can be con

cluded, without coming into contact or collision with one or other of their number. Many of the duties performed by officials on the Continent are here performed by elected parochial or municipal functionaries, many are left to individual discretion, many more are not performed at all. With us a man's free-will is limited only by his neighbour's free-will and his neighbour's rights; in France, as in Austria, it can be exercised only subject to government or police permission previously obtained. Restriction is the exception here; it is the rule there. Throughout the Continent, a citizen cannot engage in business, build a house, or take a journey, without leave; and leave is only to be obtained through an established routine of tedious and annoying formalities which would drive an Englishman frantic.

A second operation of this centralized and over-active bureaucracy, has necessarily been to deprive the people of France of all share in those minor acts of government which should form their education for higher offices and more important functions. They have only the faintest vestiges of those municipal institutions which, with us, are such invaluable normal schools of peaceable agitation and political discussion. They have no local senates to prepare them for the central senate of the nation; or where such exist, they have no real power, and therefore excite little interest. The officials do everything: the people do nothing. They are associated with none of the acts of government except the highest. They choose no one except their legislative representatives and their executive chief-no one at least whose functions are much more than nominal. Under a bureaucracy, they have, and can have, no opportunity of training themselves in those skilful tactics, those inutual forbearances, those timely retreats, those judicious compromises, which form the essence of safe and wise political strategies. In a word, they are almost wholly without those real parochial and communal liberties, which are an indispensable preparation for national and republican liberties. Hence, when summoned to the task of selfgovernment by means of a popular assembly, they are like pilots intrusted with the navigation of a ship who have never been at sea before.

But the French system of administration, while making children of its subjects, inevitably makes a despot of its chief. He who seizes, or to whom is entrusted, the reins of Government in France, finds himself-owing to its essential construction-absolute master of every functionary in every department throughout that vast empire. Through these functionaries he finds himself invested with almost uncontrolled power over every one of his fellow-countrymen. He is at the head of the police, justice, gendarmerie, finance, and education, not merely in Paris,