When the present evils infecting our parliamentary system have
grown still graver; when a democratic House, more and more broken
up into small groups, more and more governed by sectional and
interested motives, shall have shown itself evidently incompetent
to conduct the business of the country with honour, efficiency, and
safety; when the public has learned more fully the enormous danger
to national prosperity as well as individual happiness of
dissociating power from property and giving the many an unlimited
right of confiscating by taxation the possessions of the few--some
great reconstruction of government is sure to be demanded. Fifty or
even twenty-five years hence the current of political opinion in
England will be as different from that of our own day as
contemporary political tendencies are different from those in the
generation of our fathers. Experience and arguments that are now
dismissed may then revive, and play no small part in the politics
of the future.

Why make democracy the scapegoat for all these evils, when they are
simply due to the imperfect organization of democracy? In any case, the
most that could rightly be urged would be that universal suffrage had
come before its time. The conclusion that its time will never come is
certainly not warranted. Universal suffrage cannot be condemned till it
has had a fair trial under a rational system of election. Mr. Lecky
appreciates so little the connection between the method of election and
the splitting up into groups that he views without alarm the Hare
system, which would still further develop groups.

But perhaps no one has caught the spirit of party government more truly
than Mr. Lecky. Dealing with the motives which should actuate the
statesman, in his latest work, "The Map of Life," he writes:--