In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are passing through a great transformation, social, religious, and political.  The process is full of embarrassments, difficulties, and perils.  These are the dominant marks of our era.  To set them all down to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to Liberalism.  You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time.  Western civilisation is slowly entering on a new stage.  Form of government is the smallest part of it.  It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us, who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of the past.  This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able to do.

But will wise guidance be endured?  Sir Henry Maine seems to think that it will not.  Mill thought that it would.  In a singularly luminous passage in an essay which for some reason or another he never republished, Mill says—­

“We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral convictions.  But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or their class feelings. We have a strong faith, stronger than either politicians or philosophers generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men’s minds; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own side of the question.  We expect few conversions by the mere force of reason from one creed to the other.  Men’s intellects and hearts have a large share in determining what sort of Conservatives or Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals.”

This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal assumptions of some bad philosophers, French or others.

A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS.[1]

[Footnote 1:  March 1888.]

                   Nunquamne reponam,
  Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?

Historians are only too fond of insisting on the effect of the French Revolution in checking English reform.  One of the latest of them dwells on the fatal influence of this great event in our own country, in checking, blighting, and distorting the natural progress of things.  But for that influence, he says, the closing years of the century would probably have seen the abolition of the English Slave Trade, the reform of Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.[1] The question of the precise degree of vitality in sectarian pride,