of the ministry will modify itself accordingly, so that the Crown will no longer be able to commit the helm of the state in simple alternation to the leader of the one or the other majority.  And then a time will recur in which the King in Council may have to undertake the actual leadership. (Vol. ii., pp. 452, 453.)

In other words, that an industrial society is incapable of self-government!  Note the reason for this remarkable conclusion—­a splitting up into fractions, i.e., imperfect organization.

Take now the evidence of the distinguished historian and publicist, Mr. W.E.H.  Leeky, M.P., as given in his recent work on “Democracy and Liberty":—­

After all due weight has been given to the possible remedies that have been considered, it still seems to me that the parliamentary system, when it rests on manhood suffrage, or something closely approaching to manhood suffrage, is extremely unlikely to be permanent.  This was evidently the opinion of Tocqueville, who was strongly persuaded that the natural result of democracy was a highly concentrated, enervating, but mild despotism.  It is the opinion of many of the most eminent contemporary thinkers in France and Germany, and it is, I think, steadily growing in England.  This does not mean that parliaments will cease, or that a wide suffrage will be abolished.  It means that parliaments, if constructed on this type, cannot permanently remain the supreme power among the nations of the world.  Sooner or later they will sink by their own vices and inefficiencies into a lower plane.  They will lose the power of making and unmaking ministries, and it will be found absolutely necessary to establish some strong executive independently of their fluctuations.  Very probably this executive may be established, as in America and under the French Empire, upon a broad basis of an independent suffrage.  Very possibly upper chambers, constituted upon some sagacious plan, will again play a great restraining and directing part in the government of the world.  Few persons who have watched the changes that have passed over our own House of Commons within the last few years will either believe or wish that in fifty years’ time it can exercise the power it now does.  It is only too probable that some great catastrophe or the stress of a great war may accelerate the change. (Vol. i., pp. 300, 301.)

And the reason assigned for this very unsatisfactory state of affairs is precisely as before: 

All the signs of the times point to the probability in England as elsewhere of many ministries resting on precarious majorities formed out of independent or heterogeneous groups.  There are few conditions less favourable to the healthy working of parliamentary institutions or in which the danger of an uncontrolled House of Commons is more evident.  One consequence of this disintegration of Parliament is a greatly increasing probability