that policies which the nation does not really wish for may be carried into effect.  The process which the Americans call “log-rolling” becomes very easy.  One minority will agree to support the objects of another minority on condition of receiving in return a similar assistance, and a number of small minorities aiming at different objects, no one of which is really desired by the majority of the nation, may attain their several ends by forming themselves into a political syndicate and mutually co-operating. (Vol. i., pp. 152, 153.)

Mr. Lecky, too, holds out very little hope for the future:—­

When the present evils infecting our parliamentary system have grown still graver; when a democratic House, more and more broken up into small groups, more and more governed by sectional and interested motives, shall have shown itself evidently incompetent to conduct the business of the country with honour, efficiency, and safety; when the public has learned more fully the enormous danger to national prosperity as well as individual happiness of dissociating power from property and giving the many an unlimited right of confiscating by taxation the possessions of the few—­some great reconstruction of government is sure to be demanded.  Fifty or even twenty-five years hence the current of political opinion in England will be as different from that of our own day as contemporary political tendencies are different from those in the generation of our fathers.  Experience and arguments that are now dismissed may then revive, and play no small part in the politics of the future.

Why make democracy the scapegoat for all these evils, when they are simply due to the imperfect organization of democracy?  In any case, the most that could rightly be urged would be that universal suffrage had come before its time.  The conclusion that its time will never come is certainly not warranted.  Universal suffrage cannot be condemned till it has had a fair trial under a rational system of election.  Mr. Lecky appreciates so little the connection between the method of election and the splitting up into groups that he views without alarm the Hare system, which would still further develop groups.

But perhaps no one has caught the spirit of party government more truly than Mr. Lecky.  Dealing with the motives which should actuate the statesman, in his latest work, “The Map of Life,” he writes:—­

In free countries party government is the best if not the only way of conducting public affairs, but it is impossible without a large amount of moral compromise; without a frequent surrender of private judgment and will.  A good man will choose his party through disinterested motives, and with a firm and honest conviction that it represents the cast of policy most beneficial to the country.  He will on grave occasions assert his independence of party, but in the large majority of cases he must act with his party,