Meanwhile, the existence of the Indian problem loosens half-consciously his grip upon democratic principle in matters nearer home.  Newspapers and magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real to him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London ‘latch-key’ lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it would have been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, and Bengalis, and Parsees should be refused it.

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in the middle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feeling that the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting.  But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time in which the disinterested examination of political principles has been more urgently required.  Hitherto the main stimulus to political speculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of the Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle for supremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century.  The outstanding social events in Europe in our own time have, however, been so far the failures rather than the successes of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion and courage in Russia, owing to the deep-seated intellectual divisions among the reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and means of communication give to any government however tyrannous and corrupt; the baffling of the German social-democrats by the forces of religion and patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the weakness of the successive waves of American Democracy when faced by the political power of capital.

But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thought as the most successful revolution, and, in many respects, that demand is now being well answered.  Political experience is recorded and examined with a thoroughness hitherto unknown.  The history of political action in the past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become the subject of organised and minutely subdivided labour.  The new political developments of the present, Australian Federation, the Referendum in Switzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England and America, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed and compared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulate through all the universities of the globe.