MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT.[1]

[Footnote 1: February 1886.]


"If the government of the Many," says the distinguished author of the
volume before us, "be really inevitable, one would have thought that
the possibility of discovering some other and newer means of enabling
It to fulfil the ends for which all governments exist would have been
a question exercising all the highest powers of the strongest minds,
particularly in the community which, through the success of its
popular institutions, has paved the way for modern Democracy. Yet
hardly anything worth mentioning has been produced on the subject in
England or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, Is strangely to
ignore three or four very remarkable books that have been published
within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have excited
immense attention and discussion, and that are the work of minds that
even Sir Henry Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We are no
adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, but there are
important public men who think that his work on the _Election of
Representatives_ is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the
_Principia_ was in natural philosophy. J.S. Mill's volume on
_Representative Government_, which appeared in 1861, was even a more
memorable contribution towards the solution of the very problem
defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was the older Mill's article on
Government In 1820 to the political difficulties of the eve of the
Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on Parliamentary Government
failed in making its expected mark on legislation, but it was worth
mentioning because It goes on the lines of the very electoral law in
Belgium which Sir Henry Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most