point of view.  The whole force of the attack lies in what is taken to be the attested fact that the principle of a hereditary chamber supervising an elective chamber has worked, is working, and will go on working, inconveniently, stupidly, and dangerously.  Finally, there is the question of the Irish Union.  Is it the English or Scottish Crowd that is charged with a wanton desire to recast the Union?  Nobody knows much about the matter who is not perfectly aware that the English statesman, whoever he may be, who undertakes the inevitable task of dealing with the demand for Home Rule, will have to make his case very plain indeed in order to make the cause popular here.  Then is it the Irish Crowd?  Sir Henry Maine, of all men, is not likely to believe that a sentiment which the wisest people of all parties in Ireland for a hundred years have known to lie in the depths of the mind of the great bulk of the Irish population, to whom we have now for the first time given the chance of declaring their wishes, is no more than a gratuitous and superficial passion for change for its own sake.  The sentiment of Irish nationality may or may not be able to justify itself in the eye of prudential reason, and English statesmen may or may not have been wise in inviting it to explode.  Those are different questions.  But Sir Henry Maine himself admits in another connection (p. 83) that “vague and shadowy as are the recommendations of what is called a Nationality, a State founded on this principle has generally one real practical advantage, through its obliteration of small tyrannies and local oppressions.”  It is not to be denied that it is exactly the expectation of this very practical advantage that has given its new vitality to the Irish National movement which seems now once more, for good or for evil, to have come to a head.  When it is looked into, then, the case against the multitudes who are as senselessly eager to change institutions as other multitudes once were to break off the noses of saints in stone, falls to pieces at every point.

Among other vices ascribed to democracy, we are told that it is against science, and that “even in our day vaccination is in the utmost danger” (p. 98).  The instance is for various reasons not a happy one.  It is not even precisely stated.  I have never understood that vaccination is in much danger.  Compulsory vaccination is perhaps in danger.  But compulsion, as a matter of fact, was strengthened as the franchise went lower.  It is a comparative novelty in English legislation (1853), and as a piece of effectively enforced administration it is more novel still (1871).  I admit, however, that it is not endured in the United States; and only two or three years ago it was rejected by an overwhelming majority on an appeal to the popular vote in the Swiss Confederation.  Obligatory vaccination may therefore one day disappear from our statute book, if democracy has anything to do with it.  But then the obligation