order reigns. Several cases have of late been reported of members of the House who have resolved to retire because there was nothing worth doing to be done and they were wasting time which might be spent more profitably on their own affairs. Plutocratic oligarchy riding on the shoulders of democracy is the singular result to which the course of things at present seems to tend.

It is with regard to the form provided for the election of the President, however, that the work of the Fathers has most signally and perhaps most unhappily failed. Their intention was that the President should be elected by chosen bodies of select and responsible citizens. For a time the nominations were kept, if not in the hands which the legislators had intended, at least in select hands. But since the Jacksonian era, nomination and election have been completely in the hands of the democracy at large, and the election has been performed by a process of national agitation and conflict which sets at work all the forces of political intrigue and corruption on the most enormous scale, besides filling the country with passions almost as violent and anti-social as those of civil war. The qualification for the nomination is no longer eminence but availability. It is not a question which man is most worthy of public confidence, but which man can carry New York or Ohio. Anything like military or naval success, however unaccompanied by any presumption of statesmanship, dazzles, as the line of Presidents and nominees shows, and is preferred to political qualifications. Admiral Dewey was near being nominated for President. The nominating conventions are vast orgies of intrigue and uproar, the issue of which is not likely to be the choice of the worthiest. If Lincoln was nominated, his success was due not so much to his

merits as to local clamor. One nomination was gained, it appeared, by flashy metaphor and a big voice. The power of the big voice, though unaccompanied by the big brain, in a reign of the convention wigwam and the stump is very great. To one who made that remark it was replied that clearness of voice was more effective than loudness. Whether it was drum or fife that prevailed, it was still sound and not sense.

We must go back to the Guelphs and Ghibelins of the Italian Republics to find a legal recognition of faction as the ruling power of a state. Under the soft name of "party," faction is now in the United States fully recognized by law; legal enactments are made for its operation, and a distribution of offices, such as those of the Civil Service Commissioners, is by law directed to be made on party lines. A nation which deliberately gives itself up to government by faction signs its own doom. The end may be delayed, but it is sure. The party organizations have overlaid the American Constitution. For this the framers of the Constitution are not to blame. Their sagacity must have been supernatural to foresee the Machine and the Boss. Washington abhorred party, and regarded it as a disease which he hoped to avert by putting Federalists and anti-Federalists in his Cabinet together. Our present system of party government is the offspring of the struggle in England between constitutionalism, represented by the Hanoverians, and despotism, represented by the Stuarts. That struggle gave it for the time a reasonable warrant. A reasonable warrant was given it again by the division of opinion on the French Revolution, and once more by the division on the subject of Parliamentary reform. So, in the United States, while the struggle with slavery lasted, party was a

natural and inevitable, though baneful and anti-social, bond. But in ordinary times there is nothing to divide a nation into two halves perpetually waging political war against each other, and striving, each of them, to make government miscarry in its rival's hands. To justify party government, Mr. Olney says, there must be a strong and honest Opposition. But supposing there is no vital issue on which an Opposition can be rationally formed-is it to be formed by conscription? As a matter of fact, the masses follow a shibboleth, often heredditary, almost always devoid of sense. The Republican and Democratic parties in the United States are now two standing machines, waging everlasting war for the Presidency and an immense patronage. Platforms are made up when a Presidential election impends simply with a view to carrying that election. The parties have no fixed creed or abiding character. The Democratic party lost its vital force when slavery fell. It was an alliance of the Southern slave-owner with the commercial plutocracy of the North, drawing in their train the Irish populace of the Northern cities. One who had formed his idea of the Republican party half a century ago would hardly know the party again now. Lincoln, with his pure patriotism and his humanitarianism, would find himself strangely out of place. The grand aim of each party is to prevent the country from being successfully governed by its rival. Each will do anything to catch votes, and anything rather than lose them. Government consequently, is at the mercy of any organization which has votes on a large scale to sell. The Grand Army of the Republic is thus enabled to levy upon the nation tribute to the amount of a hundred and forty millions thirty-six years after the war, while both parties

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in their platforms promise their countenance to the exaction. The history of the most corrupt monarchies could hardly furnish a more monstrous case of financial abuse, to say nothing of the effect upon national character. The late J. M. Forbes, of Boston, was a strong Republican as well as the best of citizens. He said, as we learn from his Memoir, that the war with Spain was no philanthropic war, but was made to keep a party in power. Each party machine has a standing army of wire-pullers with an apparatus of intrigue and corruption, to the support of which holders of offices under Government are assessed. The Boss is a recognized authority, and mastery of unscrupulous intrigue is his avowed qualification for his place. The pest of partyism invades municipal administration, and makes New York the plunder of thieves of one party, and Philadelphia of thieves of the other. It is surely impossible that any nation should endure such a system for ever.

Another growth, less noxious than the above-named, but still noxious, seems to be that of localism in elections. This the people have voluntarily imposed upon themselves. It cannot fail to deprive the commonwealth of good servants. George W. Curtis was excluded from public life because he happened to reside in a Democratic district and no constituency would elect a non-resident.

"If time of course alter all things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?" But in this case how are wisdom and counsel to be brought into play? If either party attempted to amend the Constitution, the other party would try at once to raise a storm. The modes of constitutional amendment are excessively cumbrous and difficult; so that to carry

an amendment of any importance it took the momentum of civil war; a defect perhaps partly due to the vicious entanglement of compact in the cases of slavery and of representation in the Senate with the proper functions of legislation.

There are two matters, both most momentous, both fraught with peril, which were as far as possible from the thoughts of the framers of the Constitution, but with which its revisers, if ever it is revised, will be called upon to deal. One of these is the constitutional treatment of the emancipated negro; the other is that of the application of the Constitution to oversea conquests and possessions.

The status of the emancipated negro is the subject of the only important amendments passed since the era of the Constitution. Unfortunately those amendments were framed not by coolheaded statesmen, but by ardent friends of the negro, fired with victory in a long and desperate war over that object of their hatred, the Southern white, while a leading man among them had a personal injury to avenge. Nor is it necessary to dilate on the difficulties of the problem. They press on all American minds. The Roman commons were right in deeming political equality incomplete till they had extorted from the patricians the right of intermarriage. Of two races, one of which spurns intermarriage with the other, no political architect apparently can construct a Democratic Republic. Nor does the negro appear as yet, in St. Domingo or elsewhere, to have developed real aptitude for self-government. The highest statesmanship with a perfectly free hand might devise and establish a harmonious settlement. But the highest statesmanship is not forthcoming; nor, if it were, would party allow it a free hand.

The attempt of the Supreme Court

to determine the constitutional status of the oversea conquests and possessions, there being absolutely no data, seemed little more hopeful than the schoolman's attempt to measure the possible action of a chimera. Of the existence of conquered and subject territories the framers of the Constitution never dreamed; they would have shrunk from the thought if they had. In annexing Hawaii and in conquering the Philippines the American Republic has departed from its fundamental principles and changed its character. Its possession of the canal, and practically of Panama, seems likely to lead on to the ultimate annexation of Mexico and the whole of Central America. These being added to the Southern States, with their negroes and their unrepublican sentiment, the result can hardly fail to be either a radical change of polity from the Republican form to something practically Imperial, such as is the necessary concomitant of empire, or to the disruption of the Union. Jingoism is still in full blast. Flagworship is the religion of the day. Language the most anti-Jeffersonian and anti-humanitarian, to use no stronger term, is rife in the press. Every day produces something betokening an advance upon that line. An eminent journal settles the Panama question by saying, "It is in our line of business; we have got it, and we mean to keep it." There are still, undoubtedly, forces, and powerful forces, on the other side. But the balance wavers. It is a critical hour in the life of the American Republic, and therefore in the life of the world.

That the American people have political wisdom and force to deal with the crisis in their destinies no one who has lived among them will doubt, though the proportion of the self-governing and controlling element in the population is being dangerously

reduced by the vast inflow of foreign elements and the infecundity of the American women. But to such an effort the leadership of a great man is almost indispensable, and under such conditions, with such modes of The Monthly Review

electing the chief of the State, how and from what quarter is the great man to appear? The forces of political self-preservation and recovery undoubtedly are there, but how those forces to be brought to bear? Goldwin Smith.

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CHAPTER IV.

HALL.

SIR JOCELYN GILLIBRAND.

Mrs. Ullathorne was forced to stay over Sunday with us, for though armies of stout lassies were employed in scrubbing and cleaning the Hall, it was as yet so far from habitable that my Mother would not hear of our guest removing thither. Moreover, Malachi had been despatched to Liverpool to purchase bedding, cooking utensils and other indispensable household goods, and it would have been impossible for her to take possession of her new premises until his return.

Well do I remember that Sunday morning. We walked, as usual, across the fields to Church; my Father and Mother leading the way as was their wont, each holding a hand of little Johnny, who was very proud of being permitted to discard his frock and to appear in his little coat and breeches, with white stockings and buckle shoes complete. I followed next, arrayed in my best suit, and reverently carrying not only my own books but those of Mrs. Dorothy. She was habited in black, with a soft lawn kerchief at her neck, and a very elegant hood. I mind her dress well because of Lady Gillibrand's strictures on it.

The first bell was still ringing as we filed through the Church door, which was as it should be, for Lady

Gillibrand was mighty particular in this respect; it was her custom to seat herself in the family pew at the first stroke of this bell, and woe betide any of the congregation who arrived after it had ceased ringing. From behind the red baize curtain her Ladyship kept watch, and all hapless stragglers were severely reprimanded.

Nevertheless her Son, Sir Jocelyn, not infrequently put in a tardy appearance, for as often as not, instead of taking his place by his Mother's side in the coach, he walked across the fields with his dog at his heels, and switching with his cane at the wayside grasses as though it had been a week-day; there were even folks who averred that in fine weather he sometimes whistled as he went. None of the congregation would have dreamt of imitating such conduct, and many of the elders were grieved for her Ladyship, knowing well what a sore trial it must be to one of her high principles that her own Son, and the Lord of the Manor to boot, should permit himself these indulgences. And when, on quitting the Church, we saw the dog which had been tethered by the gate leap up with unseemly barking and fawn upon his master, those possessed of right feeling amongst us turned our heads

away.

My Lady Gillibrand always drove to