salary to the Lord President of the Council. Such controversy has passed far beyond the line which separates political ingenuity from political imbecility. It is a mournful confession of intellectual bankruptcy.

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The wiser publicists of the party are recognising the futility of these methods, and seriously considering the work of reconstruction. Unfortunately in this work they encounter a fundamental disagreement. There are two questions at issue in which the party is hopelessly at variance. The one is the question of Tariff Reform. The other is the question of social reform. One party would attack the present administration from the standpoint of the friends of property; protesting itself as the only barrier against a predatory and advancing Socialism. The other would attempt to regain the allegiance of the democracy by outbidding the Liberals with an advanced social policy. The one party again, convinced that the fear of protective food taxes is in the main responsible for the Tory débâcle, would urge the Opposition quietly to drop the accursed thing,' and to concentrate upon a general policy in defence of Property, Church, and Constitution. The other, convinced that the desire for protection of British labour against foreign manufactured articles is the one attractive and constructive item in an otherwise uninspiring appeal, is determined to advocate Tariff Reform in the constituencies as the first item of any Tory programme. There has thus arisen the possibility of four main groups, and each position commands some measure of adherence. There are Tariff Reformers who repudiate advanced social reform; and these represent perhaps the bulk of the party, including most of the large newspapers and the old Tory backbone in wealth and society. There are Tariff Reformers who demand advanced social reform, like Lord Milner, Mr. Garvin, the Morning Post, and a tiny but influential band of Tory Democrats. There are Tory Free Traders who are advanced social reformers, though these, it must be confessed, form an exceedingly scanty company. And there are Tory Free Traders who are making a desperate fight against advanced social reform, like Lord Cromer, Lord Hugh Cecil, and the editor of the Spectator, to whom old-age pensions, the feeding of school children, or the graduation of an incometax are only less repugnant than the full Protective system. Events have sufficiently developed, however, to demonstrate the main lines of advance. The Tory party will go forward in its main stream as a Protectionist party, mildly committed to the more innocuous social reforms-' reasonable' social reforms, in the official definition. On one flank an influential but limited body of opinion will endeavour to minimise both its Protection and its social advances; on the other a limited but influential body of opinion will be endeavouring to drag it forward into a more advanced advocacy of both of them.

Meantime the Liberal observers look on with some complacency while the two parties tear each other to pieces on rival platforms,

and in belligerent newspapers. Each is fighting for the soul of Mr. Balfour, and for that middle and neutral following which is prepared to endorse any party programme, so long as it is convinced that this is the party programme and not a transitory deflection from the normal. Neither is very confident that it has got him; or, if it has got him for the moment, that it will retain him. He probably believes as little in one as in the other. He has no faith in either Tariff Reform or social reform as a means of curing what he regards as the natural and inevitable ills of humanity. He looks outside and from afar at the confusion and squalor of the populous cities with a mixture of doubt, indifference, and compassion. At Birmingham he defined 'Socialism' in terms which no sane man affirms, and 'social reform' in terms which no sane man denies. On the other hand, he has little sympathy with the rigid individualism which has passed from its former position in the Liberal ranks over to the Tory fold, and cares nothing for any defence of wealth and privilege unless wealth and privilege can justify themselves in intellectual, artistic, or social service. All this extreme right of Toryism, indeed, presents the forlornest spectacle. It is the spectacle of men fighting, in the service of an empty and barren logic, against the whole movement of the age. They still endeavour to believe that arguments seemingly incontestible to those comfortably removed from the stress and misery of the poor will seem equally incontestible to the poor themselves. They look upon the twentieth century as an unbroken continuance of the nineteenth; not having seen the vision, as revealed to a former King Edward, of the turning in their sleep of the Seven Sleepers in their cave outside Ephesus, which has presaged large changes in the world. 'Democracy is here,' wrote Carlyle. In England, though we object to it resolutely . . . the tramp of its feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings, in all thinkings and modes and activities of men. The soul that does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we address on this occasion.' The soul of the Tory Free Trader emphatically appears to-day as 'not the one we address on this occasion.' Mr. Strachey, in his assertion that, were the funds for old-age pensions to be rained down from heaven, he would refuse them in the interests of the moral development of the working man, has to be roughly recalled to realities by Mr. Garvin, in the reminder that modern politics are not to be determined by what we may call the country-house point of view-a point of view from which the industrial England, which is going to settle this question, is physically invisible.'

Back, then, I would come in conclusion, to the position which I was permitted to defend in this Review more than a year ago. Realities have crashed into the activities of politics, which generally manage successfully to elude them. The social question has at

last 'arrived' in England, as it has arrived previously in other European lands. Henceforth of necessity it must dominate the situation. 'Man will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better paid by man,' says a great writer, 'which, let Parliaments speak of them or be silent of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without penalty, and at length not without death penalty, be withheld.' The interest of the immediate future is largely bound up with the attitude in which each political party will confront this vigorous intruder. To the Liberal party, as the party in possession, is offered the greatest opportunity. If it can realise the magnitude of the challenge now presented and go forward boldly in some large and far-reaching scheme of social reform—in universal old-age pensions, in a national unemployed policy, in a shifting of local imposts from the houses and factories to the land-it may find itself not inadequate to the needs of the newer time. Tariff Reform, on the other hand, undoubtedly has a future as a practical weapon of social appeal. As an Imperial readjustment it has already become dead and a vision. As a means of promising more work for all, it will never lack allegiance. The fact that it is utterly indefensible as an economic system-if it be utterly indefensible— is no kind of guarantee that it may not become a political reality. 'What's the use of talking to a hungry pauper about Heaven?' was Kingsley's forlorn inquiry. 'What's the use of lecturing the unemployed about" the balance of trade"?' is the equally pertinent inquiry of the Tariff Reformer. The appeal of Protection has hitherto only been propagated on a rising and therefore an unfavourable market. What would be its effect on a falling one? Only two forces are potent enough to disturb the great impact of this social upheaval. The one is the force of nationality. The other is the force of religion. Governments may be convinced that if the priests (of all churches) were removed, religious questions, in education and elsewhere, would no longer disturb them. But if they legislate upon the assumption that the priests have been removed, they are apt to suffer rude awakenings. Ireland, the home of a nation with a 'mind diseased,' stands outside all this bubbling and ferment of a new social interest. A Parliament with some eighty Irish members allied with a similar force of independent Labour, holding the balance between a Liberal majority and a Protectionist minority, would provide a political situation rich with unknown possibility of change. It is a political situation which demands no miracle for its production before the expiration of this first decade of the century.

CHARLES F. G. MASTERMAN,

VOL. LXIII-No. 371

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PARLIAMENT AND PARTY

NEARLY nine years ago (March 1899) I wrote an article in this REVIEW, asking the question whether the party system was breaking up. The question was suggested by a speech of Mr. Balfour's and a letter written by Mr. Goldwin Smith to the editor of the Times in the previous January, the latter thinking that the system was approaching its end; the former, that after a little 'shuffling of the cards' affairs would go on as before. I should premise that by the term ' party system' in this article the two-party system is always meant; and now, after the lapse of nine years, we are entitled to ask which of the two predictions was nearer the truth. Party certainly has not yet vanished. But an opinion is very commonly entertained that it has nearly reached vanishing point, and that the next quarter of a century will witness its extinction. This opinion is founded chiefly, I believe, on the development of the group system, which has been gradually growing in several successive Parliaments, and in the one now sitting has attained such dimensions as to make united party action in the old sense of the word, if not impossible, at least uncertain and precarious. It may be that these various independent groups do not mean all that they say, and that when it came to the point their bark would be found worse than their bite. Time, and no long time either, will show this. But my own opinion is that, even supposing the present condition of the party system to point to its approaching dissolution, Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists are unconsciously laying the foundations of a new one, which will rise upon the ruins of the old, with equal prospects of permanence and stability.

The party system has experienced some rude shocks, and has been thrown off its balance before now as violently as it was by the last General Election. But hitherto it has always righted itself. After 1832, and again after 1846, though from very different causes, it experienced a severe strain, and during the ten years that followed the death of Sir Robert Peel, the leading statesmen who bore his name frequently deplored the break-up of the system, and regretted the difficulties that stood in the way of its restoration. To its political and practical value Mr. Gladstone and Sir James Graham bear striking testimony, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis and Mr. Disraeli both

agreed that Parliamentary government could not be conducted without it. I quote what follows in illustration of the value of this system, and as a reason why its future fortunes should be an object of the greatest interest to us at the present moment. It recovered from the tottering condition which alarmed the Peelites, and we may hope with some show of reason that it will weather the crisis of to-day.

In defence of the vote of want of confidence carried against Lord Derby's Government in 1859, Sir George Cornewall Lewis said: 'I fully admit that this motion is a party move. But I must be permitted to remark that all great questions in this House have been decided by party moves. A Parliamentary system can only be conducted by the combined operation of parties'; and he gave as instances the Reform Bill, Roman Catholic Emancipation, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, which he said were all party moves. And he added that whatever amelioration of public affairs was to be expected in future must be effected by the same means.

On the 28th of February, 1855, Mr. Gladstone told Queen Victoria that she would have 'little peace or comfort in these matters [i.e. politics] until Parliament should have returned to its old organisation in two political parties.' Asked by the Queen and the Prince when that time would come, Mr. Gladstone said he saw no signs of it at present, but that until it was reached' Her Majesty' would pass through a period of weakness and instability as regards the Executive.' It is important to remember, with a view to what follows, that during this transition period the Throne, according to Mr. Gladstone, had been growing in stability'; that is to say, that as the party system grew weaker the position of the Crown grew stronger.

Three years earlier, in 1852, Sir James Graham wrote in a desponding tone to Mr. Gladstone:

It is vain to look back; the force of circumstances and the acts of public men have, in the last generation, broken up the foundations of party. Our Parliamentary government has from the Revolution downwards rested on party, and it is not strange that the edifice should be shaken when the basis has been suddenly destroyed. It may be possible to underpin the tottering wall, but time and caution and a master's skill are wanted for this critical operation, and where shall they be found?

This letter, which was only made public a few months ago, may well set us all a-thinking. In the opinion of Sir James Graham, an experienced statesman of Liberal principles, and with a great reputation for cool-headed sagacity, the basis of Parliamentary government had in 1852 been removed, and the whole edifice which rested on it was tottering. To what acts of public men' he was here referring is a little uncertain, nor does it signify to the present argument. But that such a man should have believed that at the period in question Parliamentary government was 'tottering' naturally leads one to

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