victions.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully
aware of the necessity of mutual concession--more willing than most to
be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the
administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical
experience of his permanent subordinates--but one whom, assuredly, no
one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or
popular feeling.

Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, _coeteris paribus,_
to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was
likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many
educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and
over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of
numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and
madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and
distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant,
thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that
pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a
profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from
the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their
natural bias.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly
distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party
necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his
insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the
sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily
controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his
'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly
adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular
judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid
_vision_ of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity,
liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all
things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the
national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into
the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form
of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this
work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.

'Even if I were to decide in favour of one of these forms,
and against