enty would have terrified men accustomed to sift the
'capital' and 'revenue' accounts of great Companies, and to calculate
the resources of Empires as a peasant the yield of his farm. But the
millions were content; the worse the credit of the State, the higher the
interest on their savings; the embellishment of Paris and other great
public works were a practical acknowledgement of the _droit au travail_;
and the calculations of those, who criticised the fearful waste
(_coulage_) of such a system, proved to demonstration that a spendthrift
State must come to the end of a spendthrift _rentier_--with what
consequences the Commune of 1871 bare witness--found no attention; spoke
in a tongue not understood by the people. The masses were not even
alarmed by the warnings of veteran statesmen, consummate financiers, and
_doctrinaires_ of every school. Only in those great crises when all that
is left to wisdom is a choice of calamities, as in 1848 and 1871, does
Demos abdicate; recognize for a moment that all men are not born, much
less trained to remain, free _and equal_, and entreat the pilots by
hereditary profession to see the ship of State through the breakers.

In the criticism, and especially in the best, most thoughtful, and least
obvious criticism, provoked by the long foreseen electoral settlement of
last year, the direct and indirect influence of Mr. Bagehot's writings
was constantly to be traced. On this subject he had looked back and
looked forward farther than most political reasoners. Household suffrage
seemed to him the inevitable consequence, the logical development, of
the reform of 1832. It was at that point, as he considered, that the
right and wrong path had diverged; that chance and destiny, rather than
choice, determined at the moment the adoption of that which led
necessarily and logically to sheer Democracy. The practice of the old
system had become throughly vicious, but the underlying principle was
sound and safe. All classes, all interests, were represented; but
accident had given, not to wealth or birth, but to a particular kind of
wealth, a certain set of families, an enormously disproportionate
representation. The landed interest was wronged in the utterly
inadequate representation of the counties. Ireland was misrepresented;
and the Scotch people could not be said to be represented at all. But
every class, every great interest, had its spokesmen; exercised a direct
and independent influence in the n