[68] Hume’s Essays, chap. iv.

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be secured once for all by religious faith.  His rulers were to establish and teach a religion in which they need not believe.  They were to tell their people ’one magnificent lie’;[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease which it was intended to cure.

[69] [Greek:  gennaion ti en pseudomenous] (Republic, p. 414).

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture be better than anything else which can be substituted for it.  And representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity, but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations.  In England at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in constituencies based upon locality.  But in all these respects, age, sex, qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given to the representative, variation is possible.

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work.  In Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary local constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative government is impossible.  A slow process of education might increase the proportion of voters, but meanwhile it would surely be possible for men, who understand the way in which Egyptians or Arabs think and feel, to discover other methods by which the vague desires of the native population can be ascertained, and the policy of the government made in some measure to depend on them.

[70] Times, January 6, 1908.

The need for invention is even more urgent in India, and that fact is apparently being realised by the Indian Government itself.  The inventive range of Lord Morley and his advisers does not, however, for the moment appear to extend much beyond the adaptation of the model of the English House of Lords to Indian conditions, and the organisation of an ’advisory Council of Notables’;[71] with the possible result that we may be advised by the hereditary rent-collectors of Bengal in our dealings with the tillers of the soil, and by the factory owners of Bombay in our regulation of factory labour.