uneducative and which often lead to no permanent employment in later years; meanwhile they forget the lessons of the schools and become ignorant, restless, and undisciplined men, frequently stunted in physique owing to premature strain. We have as a result workmen not fitted for doing their best for the nation, their employers, or themselves, with small intelligence and little adaptability, and not therefore capable of earning wages which would enable them to bring up strong and healthy families. This state of things is partly due to the demand for cheap boy-labour for simple machinery, and for the distribution of machine products. We must dispense with this cheap boylabour and make still further demands on invention, so that all mechanical, automatic and unintelligent work shall be done by machines. That the workman may be more capable of managing machinery, more stable and more intelligent, both as a producer and a citizen, we must retain the boy longer under the discipline of school and the instruction of teachers, who will watch the development of his body as well as of his mind. To effect this we ought immediately to raise the age of full-time attendance at school to fifteen, and make some provision for part-time instruction till eighteen. Later we may come nearer the Elizabethan ideal and extend these ages of training still further. One way may be a period of compulsory military service between eighteen and twenty, which shall include some real technical training as well as physical development; but this raises issues which go beyond the immediate subject. Without question one of the best ways of dealing with labour unrest and unemployment is to remove from the labour market the unstable and ill-trained youths who are now engaged in uneducative and often irregular work. Such work in no way helps these immature youths to become efficient wage-earners, fit to be the fathers of the next generation, and to carry to a higher degree of perfection the industrial productivity of the nation. CYRIL JACKSON.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERALISM.

I. Lord Morley: Miscellanies, Fourth Series. Macmillan. 1908. Speeches as Chancellor of Manchester University, November 1911 and June 1912, reported in the Times.'

Speech at Blackburn on Politics and Letters,' July 25, 1912.

2. The Meaning of Liberalism. By J. M. ROBERTSON, M.P. Methuen & Co. 1912.

3. Modern Democracy. By BROUGHAM VILLIERS. T. Fisher Unwin. 1912.

4. The Cult of Incompetence. (Translated from the French of Émile Faguet by BEATRICE BARSTOW.) John Murray. 1911.

MR.

R. GLADSTONE died in 1898, and with him passed away the old Liberalism, that bundle of beliefs, maxims, and policies which, curiously compounded of the theories of Rousseau, Paine, Bentham, and the elder Mill, began to adapt itself to the practical intelligence of the British middle class after the reform of Parliament in 1832. The aims and achievements of the Liberal party were the freeing of our international trade, the removal of religious disabilities, the wider distribution of political power, the strict and economic administration of public finance, and the avoidance of war. The regnant idea of middle-class Liberalism was the freeing of the individual and the setting him to do the best he could for himself and his family. Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy was a 'side-show,' and consisted in moving back the relation of landlord and tenant from contract to status, and in beginning to lend the tenant public money to buy his land. All this while the Conservative party was moving slowly along the line of State Socialism, the landlords not being sorry to retaliate upon the manufacturers for the repeal of the Corn Law by passing factory, and workshop, and housing Acts. Both parties co-operated in making primary education compulsory and gratuitous, and both parties, with more or less insincerity, took a hand in extending the franchise. Up to this point the upper and middle classes had been getting on famously together; they understood one another perfectly; and the proletariat, not too uncomfortable, was dismissing both parties with 'sabre-cuts of Saxon speech 'not fit for ears

polite. Into this happy family thrust himself Parnell, not so much an immoral as an unmoral man, for he did not know what scruples meant, and his hatred of the British middleclass Liberal almost made him mad. Parnell killed parliamentary government, for in gagging him we were obliged to gag ourselves, and he broke up for good and all-though it was not seen at the time-the party of middle-class Liberalism. Mr. Gladstone chose to appeal from middle-class Liberals to the proletariat, which was not ready for him, and his failure produced for twenty years a purely artificial arrangement of political parties. Whigs, Birmingham Radicals, and Tories all pigged it together in the same truckle bed: and the Coalition of 1895 was followed, as coalitions always are, by a confusion and obliteration of political principles. When Lord Salisbury died in 1903 he carried with him the old Conservatism, the 'conservation in England of the ancient order of things,' as surely as Mr. Gladstone five years previously had carried with him the old Liberalism.

Out of the tomb of middle-class Liberalism arose in 1906 an unformed spectre—whose advent had often been predicted, but never believed in-democracy at last! Surprised at its own victory-nobody more so-democracy glared at the governing class and its paraphernalia, much as the mob glared at Louis and Marie Antoinette in the Tuileries. So this is the House of Commons; and this is the House of Lords; and this is Mr. Balfour! Nobody knew anything about democracy, and everybody was so anxious to know: were its paths to be the paths of pleasantness and its ways the ways of peace? Mr. Balfour envisaged the new apparition in a perfectly characteristic manner: he met it with a smile and a jest. Immediately on the opening of the new Parliament the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, tabled a resolution in which he invited the House of Commons to reflect ' upon its relations with the House of Lords. 'Well,' said Mr. Balfour in his deepest and most satirical tone, glancing blandly at the Government, let them reflect: it is a process which 'can do them nothing but good.' The Opposition laughed, the pleasant, comfortable laugh of men whose title-deeds are secure and whose relations with their bankers are quite satisfactory. Alas for the old order and its champion! Within four years of that light retort the super-tax and the new land

taxes had become part of the national finance, and the Parliament Act had become law. But if Mr. Balfour did not see what was coming, did anybody else see farther or more clearly than he? Did any of the Radical leaders, even in the morning flush of passion after 1906, foresee that in six years they would, easily and without serious resistance, disable the House of Lords, an older branch of the Constitution than the House of Commons, and begin the break-up of the big estates of the aristocracy? For it is the ease and rapidity with which these vast changes in social and political structure have been effected that ought to alarm the moderate man. Not only was there no resistance, there was co-operation on the part of the besieged with the besiegers. The land taxes had not begun to be collected before the big landowners took to selling their possessions right and left. The power of the peers depended quite as much upon their estates as upon their undefined political rights. This Disraeli saw very clearly when he fought the battle of protection sixty years ago. Both have been taken from them; and now it is the turn of the small landowners. The squire is now discovered to be the enemy of the people, and a 'bonnet' having quickly been found in an ambitious young barrister, the order for his dispossession has gone forth. As Duke Frederick says in 'As you Like it':

'Well, push him out of doors;

And let my officers of such a nature

Make an extent upon his house and lands:
Do this expediently, and turn him going.'

Hardly has this edict been issued than Lord Lansdowne appears in the company of Mr. Jesse Collings and announces that the old system of landownership is obsolete, and not fitted to modern ideas, and that, as a beginning, £12,000,000 must be found by the State to help tenants to become owners. To such an extent has this sudden apparition of democracy overpowered the imagination and terrified the fortitude of the Tory leaders. It is certainly worth while to inquire what this democracy is; what are its aims; what is its relation to political parties; and how far those who have anything to lose can either resist or escape from its tyranny. It is to the answering of these questions that all the political speeches and books, from which the list at the head of this article is a fair selection, have for the last six years been directed.

Let us begin by a definition of terms. In modern States the masses can never participate personally in the executive and legislative functions: those they are forced, by reason of their numbers, to entrust to deputies. By democracy is meant that the masses are the sole depositaries of the supreme power in the State, and that King, Lords, and Commons are merely instruments for the carrying out of their orders. The demos for governmental purposes is the whole body of voters, eleventwelfths of whom pay no direct taxes. It was apparently about four years ago that Lord Morley discovered that democracy is not the same thing as Liberalism, and the discovery annoyed him, for with all his air of polished detachment there In the Fourth is no stouter partisan than Lord Morley. 'Series of his Miscellanies,' published in 1908, Lord Morley complains, a little tartly, of the reaction of democracy against Liberalism, which he ascribes to four causes, the decay of religious belief, a stream of German idealism (presumably an allusion to Utopian Socialism), the success of Bismarck's blood-andiron policy, and the belief that physical science had given its verdict in favour of violence and against social justice. With a sigh the philosopher-statesman bows democracy out of his library. 'Democracy has long passed out beyond mere praise and blame. Dialogues and disputations on its success or 'failure are now an idle quarrel. Democracy is what it is. Its own perils encompass it. They are many, they are grave. Spiritual power in the old sense there is none; the material 'power of wealth is formidable. Like kings and nobles in old ' time, so in our time the man in the street will have his sycophants and parasites.' In the last twelve months Lord Morley has been speaking again about politics and history, and his confidence in democracy does not seem to have increased. In his address as Chancellor of Manchester University, delivered on June 28 last, Lord Morley painted an unflattering portrait of the democratic statesman :

'Ardent spirits have common faults in a stirring age. We know it all. They are so apt to begin where they should end. Pierced by thoughts of the ills in the world around them, they are overwhelmed by a noble impatience to remove, to lessen, to abate. Before they have set sail, they insist that they already see some new planet swimming into their ken, and touch the promised land. An abstract a priori notion, formed independently of experience, independently of evidence, is straightway clothed with all the