pers
and magazines and steamships are constantly making India more real to
him, and the conviction of a Liberal that Polish immigrants or London
'latch-key' lodgers ought to have a vote is less decided than it would
have been if he had not acquiesced in the decision that Rajputs, and
Bengalis, and Parsees should be refused it.

Practical politicians cannot, it is true, be expected to stop in the
middle of a campaign merely because they have an uncomfortable feeling
that the rules of the game require re-stating and possibly re-casting.
But the winning or losing of elections does not exhaust the whole
political duty of a nation, and perhaps there never has been a time in
which the disinterested examination of political principles has been
more urgently required. Hitherto the main stimulus to political
speculation has been provided by wars and revolutions, by the fight of
the Greek States against the Persians, and their disastrous struggle for
supremacy among themselves, or by the wars of religion in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and the American and French Revolutions in
the eighteenth century. The outstanding social events in Europe in our
own time have, however, been so far the failures rather than the
successes of great movements; the apparent wasting of devotion and
courage in Russia, owing to the deep-seated intellectual divisions among
the reformers, and the military advantage which modern weapons and means
of communication give to any government however tyrannous and corrupt;
the baffling of the German social-democrats by the forces of religion
and patriotism and by the infertility of their own creed; the weakness
of the successive waves of American Democracy when faced by the
political power of capital.

But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thought
as the most successful revolution, and, in many respects, that demand is
now being well answered. Political experience is recorded and examined
with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history of political action in
the past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become the
subject of organised and minutely subdivided labour. The new political
developments of the present, Australian Federation, the Referendum in
Switzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England and
America, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed and
compared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulate
throu