There is no restraining power in the French parliamentary system to arrest a member on his easy descent, and he knows that if he escapes penal condemnation he will enjoy relative impunity.  Many deputies are men of high integrity; but virtue in a large assembly is of small force without organization, and, moreover, a group of legislators leagued together as a vigilance committee would have neither consistency nor durability, which the discipline of party can alone effect.  Corruption of this kind, which has undermined the republic, could not co-exist with party government.  A party whose ministers or supporters had incurred as much suspicion as fell on the politicians acquitted in the Panama affair would under it be swept out of existence for a period.  When the first denunciations appeared, the leaders of the party, to avert that fate, would have said to their implicated colleagues—­“In spite of your abilities and of the manifest exaggeration of these charges we must part company, for though you may have been culpable only of indiscretion, we cannot afford to be identified with doubtful transactions;” and the Opposition, eager not to lose its vantage, would scan with equal keenness the acts of its own members.  With party government the electorate would not have appeared to condone those scandals.  But as it was, when a deputy involved in them went down before his constituents, whose local interest he had well served, with no opponent more formidable than the nominee of some decayed or immature group, they gave their votes to the old member, whose influence with the prefecture in the past had benefited the district, rather than to the new comer, whose denunciations had no authority; whereas, had each electoral district been the scene of a contest between organized parties, the same spectacle would not have been presented.” (Vol. ii., pp. 302, 303.)

Mr. Bodley has, in this last sentence, touched the heart of the problem.  If the salvation of France depends on making each electoral district the scene of a contest between two organized parties, is not electoral machinery destined to play an important part in the solution?

+The United States.+—­The third great experiment in representative democracy which the nineteenth century has furnished is that which is being conducted in the United States.  The contrast with France is remarkable.  Just as France is the supreme example of want of organization, so America is the most conspicuous instance of perfect organization into two great national parties which the world has seen.  Yet both experiments were started by a revolution, and practically at the same time.  The difference lay in the fact that the Americans inherited the capacity for self-government from their British ancestors, and had already practised it in colonial times, while the French only inherited innumerable causes of dissension.

But organization is not the only characteristic feature of American politics.  Strange to say, it is accompanied by a suppression of individuality just as complete.  It is organization without responsible leadership.  For, in the first place, the politicians look on themselves not as leaders but as followers of the people; and in the second place, there are no leaders in Congress, corresponding to the cabinet ministers of British countries.