early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can be
considered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most real
reformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did not
reform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which wholly
disappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. It
enfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised very
definite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balance
between the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealth
that the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date,
however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning of
democracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way ever
discovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters the
homoeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Well
into the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer who
was the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine,
extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party move
against his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which the
old popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. The
politicians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowed
votes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowed
votes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once have
been regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passed
quietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension of
parliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentary
oligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by
that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the
concentration of colossal political funds in the private and
irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of
peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering
of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner
obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there
is a permanent block on the line. The facade and outward form of this
new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is
called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some
suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties,
there could be no system.

But if this was the evolution of parli