achievements; but in an age of considerable adventure, when a very large class of the community is struggling for distinction and wealth, it is not so easy for the descendants of a similar class of the past generation to look down upon them. It is too much like sons despising their fathers; for the aristocracy of this country is becoming daily more and more exclusively composed of the sons of the plutocracy. And this paternal character, together with their sound business heads, gives to the latter class a weight and importance in the national councils which cannot but have a very striking influence in changing the aspect of English society, and as a consequence, the English constitution. Each of the great parties - the conservative and the liberal will have its advocates among statesmen; but in office the action of wise statesmen will be very similar, whatever may be the party to which out of office they belong. The national progress is the resultant of the two contending powers, Conservatism and Liberalism. He will, I apprehend, be the best statesman who knows best how to temper and conciliate the two, and make the governmental system reflect the social elements in the state. It is well that there should be strong advocates to fight the battle of each; but the minister should not try to guide the country according to the views of either force, but in the direction of the resultant of the two. To discover that resultant will exercise his penetration; to support it against the opposing clamours of either party, his firmness and skill. It is curious to observe how, without any great desire to act in the direction of this resultant, the ministers are attracted towards it by a stern necessity. If they were violent Liberals out of office, in office they acquire a strong Conservative tinge. If they were obstinate Conservatives in opposition, as soon as they come on the Treasury Bench they begin moderately to reform. It is of the highest importance that the persons who pre Ꮓ vent the minister from leaning too much to that course of action which he advocates when out of office, should be themselves persons who can receive no favours from him, and who are themselves fit to take his place. If there are none such, the minister (as in the case of Sir Robert Walpole) becomes practically a despot; for the small fry of underlings and hack writers who may assault him are easily bought off by a place. Hence the necessity, in a constitutional country, of two independent parties, no matter what their speculative principles or theories, in order that the one out of office may be a proper and efficient check upon the one in office. At this point we must take our leave of England. The rest of the path which we are to describe is yet untraversed by our nation. Yet an Englishman writing of politics may perhaps hope for pardon when he sometimes illustrates his remarks, if by no other, by way of contrast from the history of his own country. For we who thus aspire to take a general and unbiassed survey of all countries and of all nations, are yet as unable to divest ourselves of our own private affections and sympathies as Dante, who, when he visited in his imagination the realms where the whole of mankind receive their last rewards or their last punishments, was pleased to single out along with the great and illustrious condemned his former rivals in the petty squabbles of his own town. Nor in a practical point of view is the contemplation of the later stages of national life useless to an English statesman, for in them and their prevailing characteristics, on whose absence we fondly dote, he will find the reasons of the deep-rooted and mutual aversion between monarchical absolutists and democrats on the one hand; and constitutionalists on the other. The heart of England is true to constitutional monarchy, and with an instinct which often leads right when theorists go wrong, it hates absolute democracy and absolute monarchy as things near akin, and deserving a common hatred. That it does so not without solid reason, and that in classing them together it hits a great truth, I hope to make apparent in the following chapters, which are devoted to the illustration of governments, each of which is formed out of one simple social element, or at most out of the union of two. CHAP. XVIII. THE SECOND STAGE OF THE NATIONAL ACME. CO-EXISTENCE OF PLUTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY. Τὸ μὴ μίαν ἀλλὰ δύο ἀνάγκῃ εἶναι τὴν τοιαύτην πόλιν, τὴν μὲν πενήτων, τὴν δὲ πλουσίων, οἰκοῦντας ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ, ἀεὶ ἐπιβουλεύοντας ἀλλήλοις.* PLATO, Rep., . 551. "In Boston those purse-proud people are said to hold together more than anywhere else; they scarcely associate with any but their own class, marry amongst themselves, and even live almost together in one street, viz. Beacon Street."IDA PFEIFFER's Second Voyage. "Look at this street; this it is that divides New York into two classes. Those who have not made their fortunes live to the East of Bowery-street, those who have made their fortunes live to the West."-AMPÈRE, Promenade en Amérique. THE rise of a plutocracy is a never-failing characteristic of the national acme, and sooner or later this of necessity becomes a separate and independent order of the state, and exercises a most powerful influence in changing the national character. The state of society which may be called the second stage of the national acme is not entered upon till the plutocracy has obtained its position as an independent * The (fault) is this, that such a city must necessarily become two cities, the one composed of the poor, the other of the rich, dwelling together in constant conspiracy against one another. and powerful order. in particular instances, for as many as five social forces may be present with various degrees of power and influence, and the whole which is formed by the confluence and conflicts of these constituent parts can never be the same in two instances, unless the constituent parts are all of precisely the same degree of power and influence in each instance, a coincidence which necessarily will almost No state of society varies so much never occur. It is impossible to present at once a neat, finished, and comprehensive sketch of this stage of national progress. The reader must kindly bear with me, while, like the fabricator of a detailed frieze, I put on, perhaps in capricious order, now one figure, now another, staying sometimes to note how the whole would look if the work stopped there. So long as any other secular element remains in the state, the democratic and the plutocratic elements grow up in fraternal concord together, the former the elder and the more turbulent; the latter a younger, a quieter, but a stronger brother. They both, in fully developed states, and where the plutocracy remains a separate order and does not gradually merge into the aristocracy, are exclusively of the subject race, and bear a grudge against the military noblesse, both advocate strict social equality, and each is jealous of the power of an old hereditary monarchy. But when the aristocracy has died away or become a plutocracy, when the monarchy which rose from it, and for some time struggled to overpower it, is also gone, this second stage of the national acme is before us. And then comes an entirely new phase of social arrangements. Throughout the long course of the ideal development which we have been constructing, by putting together examples, each in some measure imperfect, but contributing its quota to the knowledge of the ideal, one social element, beginning in the very depths, has ever kept welling |