up racial, or
religious, or social hatred, or the lust for foreign war, with less
scruple than does the proprietor of the worst newspaper in a democratic
State.

[68] Hume's _Essays_, chap. iv.

Plato, with his usual boldness, faced this difficulty, and proposed that
the loyalty of the subject-classes in his Republic should be secured
once for all by religious faith. His rulers were to establish and teach
a religion in which they need not believe. They were to tell their
people 'one magnificent lie';[69] a remedy which in its ultimate effect
on the character of their rule might have been worse than the disease
which it was intended to cure.

[69] [Greek: gennaion ti en pseudomenous] (_Republic_, p. 414).

But even if it is admitted that government without consent is a
complicated and ugly process, it does not follow either that government
by consent is always possible, or that the machinery of parliamentary
representation is the only possible, or always the best possible, method
of securing consent.

Government by a chief who is obeyed from custom, and who is himself
restrained by custom from mere tyranny, may at certain stages of culture
be better than anything else which can be substituted for it. And
representation, even when it is possible, is not an unchanging entity,
but an expedient capable of an infinite number of variations. In England
at this moment we give the vote for a sovereign parliament to persons of
the male sex above twenty-one years of age, who have occupied the same
place of residence for a year; and enrol them for voting purposes in
constituencies based upon locality. But in all these respects, age, sex,
qualification, and constituency, as well as in the political power given
to the representative, variation is possible.

If, indeed, there should appear a modern Bentham, trained not by
Fenelon and Helvetius, but by the study of racial psychology, he could
not use his genius and patience better than in the invention of
constitutional expedients which should provide for a real degree of
government by consent in those parts of the British Empire where men are
capable of thinking for themselves on political questions, but where
the machinery of British parliamentary government would not work. In
Egypt, for instance, one is told that at elections held in ordinary
local constituencies only two per cent, of those entitled to vote go to
the poll.[70] As long as that is the case representative governm