of conspicuous logic is true and well-founded, but undeniably they have come to regard their constitution not only as a precedent but as a model, and so have sometimes a confidence in analogous compromises, rather than in contrasted simple measures. But the half measure must be one we understand. New complexity, as such, is detestable to the English mind; and let any one who denies it, try to advocate some plan of suffrage reform at all out of the way, and see how long it will be before he ceases to be able to count his disciples upon the fingers of a single hand.

And lastly, this history and its complex consequences have made the great political question of the day, the suffrage question, exceedingly difficult; have made it such that no perfect solution can be looked for, and that only a choice of difficulties, is possible.

There are two sorts of countries in which the suffrage question is easy. In a large community of peasant proprietors and no one else, where society is homogeneous, where comfort is universal, and where education is diffused, you cannot help having tolerable constituencies. You may draw parallelograms over the country of equal area, and call them constituencies, or you may make pens of equal numbers of persons, and call them constituencies, and either way the result will be about the same. A rough nation, where a common sort of education is plenty, and comfort sure, will yield a decent sort of parliament under any electoral system, though it cannot yield a refined one under any. We may frame likewise the image of a community, in which the less educated and less wealthy part of the nation yielded a conscious loyalty to superior knowledge. This would be a deference founded expressly on reason and justified by avowed argument. In that community it would be possible to give all some votes each, but to give the rich and wise each many votes. The fealty of the community being to certain specified classes and qualities, you might openly and plainly give to those qualities and those classes a superior power in the polity.

But England is not like either of these countries. We are (as I showed at, perhaps, tedious length in a former essay) a deferential nation, but we are deferential by imagination, not by reason. The homage of our ignorant classes is paid not to individual things but to general things, not to precise things but to vague things. They are impressed by the great spectacle of English society; they bow down willingly, but they do not reckon their idols, they do not rationalise their religion. A country village is very happy and contented now; it acquiesces in a government which it likes. But it would not be contented if any one put before it bare inquiries. If any one said, ‘Will you be subject to persons who live in £20 houses, or £30 houses; or will you agree to take votes yourselves, on condition that those who live in big houses, or those who spell well, or those who add up well, shall have more votes?’ If we wish to comprehend what England really is, we should fancy a set of Dorsetshire peasants assembled by the mud-pond of the village solemnly to answer these questions. The utmost stretch of wisdom the conclave could arrive at would be, ‘Ah, sir, you gentlefolks do know; and the Queen, God bless her! will see us righted.’

Of course, as soon as we see that England is a disguised republic we must see too that the classes for whom the disguise is necessary must be tenderly dealt with. In fact, we do deal very tenderly with them, even the roughest of us. Our most bold demagogues steer clear of country villages, and small towns, and lone farmhouses, where those ideas are rife. They do not even descend into the ‘lanes’ of the city, and track the ignorant they there find. Probably if they did, they would not find the least wish for the suffrage, or the least real knowledge of what it means. These classes do often enough want much, and want it bitterly. But they would interrupt the best of Mr Bright’s speeches, as the mob did in Paris, ‘Pain, pain pas de longs discours.’ Bonaparte, we know, hoped to gain the acquiescence of the Egyptians by promising them a constitution, which (as Mr Kinglake truly said) was like a sportsman hoping to fill his game-bag by promising the partridges a House of Commons. Much the same would be the result of trying to make an explicit constitution for our ignorant classes. They now defer involuntarily, unconsciously, and happily, but they would not defer argumentatively.

The plain result is that on the whole England is not a bit like either a country where numbers rule, or a country where mind, as mind, rules. The masses are infinitely too ignorant to make much of governing themselves, and they do not know mind when they see it. Rank they comprehend, and money they