To return to Mr. Lilly.  The present position of party government in England is not due to defects in the institution itself, still less to the extension of the suffrage, but to imperfect organization.  The true remedy is, therefore, to improve organization, not to restrict the suffrage.  By this means such a condition will be brought about that if either party favours a faction it will lose in general favour; then, indeed, we may hope that the main parties themselves will cease to degenerate into factions.

The same number of the Fortnightly contains an unsigned article on “Lord Rosebery and a National Cabinet,” in which the party system is alluded to as defunct, and in which the suggestion is thrown out that on the retirement of Lord Salisbury a national cabinet should be formed, comprising both Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Rosebery.  Impending foreign complications are given as the excuse for terminating party action.  Now, it is not to be denied that party government is more suitable for what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls the industrial type of society than for the militant type.  Quite recently Lord Salisbury blamed the British Constitution for the state of unpreparedness for the present war.  But it is equally true that in foreign affairs party action is generally suspended:  in the control of India, for instance, it is so.  The real question, then, is this:  Is the danger of foreign aggression so serious that all questions of internal policy can be permanently set aside?  If we have reached this stage, the end of modern civilization is in sight.  In effect, the proposal is a return to the first stage of representation, with the difference that all sections of the people are expected to be held together by the fear of foreign aggression, instead of the fear of the aggression of the monarchy.

Mr. David Syme is a censor of a very different type.  So far from wishing to take control from the people, he would give the people absolute control over everything, and at all times.  Seldom has the case against party government been more powerfully presented than in his work on “Representative Government in England.”  But Mr. Syme founds his proposed remedies on a theory of representation which is based on the literal meaning of the word.  No one has put the delegation theory more clearly than in the following passage, or gone so far in applying it:—­

Representation is a mental act; it is the presentation or reproduction of the state of mind of another person; and before one person can represent another person he must first know what the opinions of that other person are.  A representative is a substitute; he stands in the place of, and acts for, another person.  But one man cannot act for another unless he knows what that other would do were he acting for himself.  In other words, he requires to know the motives which actuate that other person, or what influences his motives, namely, his principles and beliefs.