ing imposed from outside. Hence our tolerance of
local authorities as instruments of resistance to tyranny of the central
authority.

Our constitution is full of anomalies. Some of them are, no doubt,
impeding and mischievous. Half the world believes that the Englishman is
born illogical. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to believe that the
English care more even than the French for simplicity; but the
constitution is not logical. The complexity we tolerate is that which
has grown up. Any new complexity, as such, is detestable to the English
mind. Let anyone try to advocate a plan of suffrage reform at all out of
the way, and see how many adherents he can collect.

This great political question of the day, the suffrage question, is made
exceedingly difficult by this history of ours. We shall find on
investigation that so far from an ultra-democratic suffrage giving us a
more homogeneous and decided House of Commons it would give us a less
homogeneous and more timid house. With us democracy would mean the rule
of money and mainly and increasingly of new money working for its own
ends.

* * * * *

VOLTAIRE

The Age of Louis XIV

Voltaire's "History of the Age of Louis XIV.," was published
when its author (see p. 259), long famous, was the companion
of Frederick the Great in Prussia--from 1750 to 1753. Voltaire
was in his twentieth year when the Grand Monarque died. Louis
XIV. had succeeded his father at the age of five years, in
1643; his nominal reign covered seventy-one years, and
throughout the fifty-three years which followed Mazarin's
death his declaration "L'Etat c'est moi" had been politically
and socially a truth. He controlled France with an absolute
sway; under him she achieved a European ascendency without
parallel save in the days of Napoleon. He sought to make her
the dictator of Europe. But for William of Orange,
Marlborough, and Eugene, he would have succeeded. Politically
he did not achieve his aim; but under him France became the
unchallenged leader of literary and artistic culture and
taste, the universal criterion.

_I.--France Under Mazarin_

We do not propose to write merely a life of Louis XIV.; our aim is a far
wider one. It is to give posterity a picture, not of the actions of a
single man, but of the spirit of the men of an age the most enlightened
on record. E