where every
ant-hill is a mountain and every thistle a forest tree." These and the
other features characteristic of popular government on which Lowe
savagely descanted were pieced together out of Plato and Tocqueville,
coupled with his own disagreeable experiences of Australian politics.
None of the predicted evils can be said to have as yet become features
of the polity and government of England,[46] though the power of the
House relatively to the Cabinet does seem to be declining. Yet some of
Lowe's incidental remarks are true, and not least true is his
prediction that democracies will be found just as prone to war, just
as apt to be swept away by passion, as other kinds of government have
been. Few signs herald the approach of that millennium of peace and
enlightenment which Cobden foretold and for which Gladstone did not
cease to hope.

No one since Lowe has taken up the part of _advocatus diaboli_ against
democracy which he played in 1866.[47] Since Disraeli passed the
Household Suffrage in Boroughs Bill in 1867, a nullification of Lowe's
triumph which incensed him more than ever against Disraeli, no one has
ever come forward in England as the avowed enemy of changes designed
to popularise our government. Parties have quarrelled over the time
and the manner of extensions of the franchise, but the issue of
principle raised in 1866 has not been raised again. Even in 1884, when
Mr. Gladstone carried his bill for assimilating the county franchise
to that existing in boroughs, the Tory party did not oppose the
measure in principle, but confined themselves to insisting that it
should be accompanied by a scheme for the redistribution of seats. The
secret, first unveiled by Disraeli, that the masses will as readily
vote for the Tory party as for the Liberal, is now common property,
and universal suffrage, when it comes to be offered, is as likely to
be offered by the former party as by the latter. This gives a touch of
historical interest to Lowe's speeches of 1866. They are the swan-song
of the old constitutionalism. The changes which came in 1867 and 1884
must have come sooner or later, for they were in the natural line of
development as we see it all over the world; but they might have come
much later had not Lowe's opposition wrecked the moderate scheme of
1866. Apart from that episode Lowe's career would now be scarcely
remembered, or would be remembered by those who knew his splendid
gifts as an illustration of the