over the day's work, used
independently the phrase, 'It is a queer business.' I have heard much
the same words used in England by those professional political agents
whose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts without
illusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian
electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the Paris
Municipal Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications of
good-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democratic
electoral system.

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the
growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most
disquieting problems. In America the 'machine' takes its worst form in
those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent
the goal towards which the rest of American civilisation is apparently
tending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery
of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption
of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils.
The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest
inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the
power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial
capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed
through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in
hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban
streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and
if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the
tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules
intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men
feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to
win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questions
force themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system will
not bear the strain of an intensified social conflict. Many of the
arguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or
of the concentration of capital in America, or of social--democracy in
Germany, imply this. Popular election, it is said, may work fairly well
as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of
wealth and industrial power to make full use