it apart from the
other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly
entering on a new stage. Form of government is the smallest part of
it. It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of
escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us,
who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations
of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of
the past. This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able
to do.

But will wise guidance be endured? Sir Henry Maine seems to think that
it will not. Mill thought that it would. In a singularly luminous
passage in an essay which for some reason or another he never
republished, Mill says--

"We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral
convictions. But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand
in hand with their interests or their class feelings. _We have a
strong faith, stronger than either politicians or philosophers
generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men's
minds_; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own
side of the question. We expect few conversions by the mere force
of reason from one creed to the other. Men's intellects and hearts
have a large share in determining what _sort_ of Conservatives or
Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual
exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals."

This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should
think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to
believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal
assumptions of some bad philosophers, French or others.

A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS.[1]

[Footnote 1: March 1888.]

Nunquamne reponam,
Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?

Historians are only too fond of insisting on the effect of the French
Revolution in checking English reform. One of the latest of them
dwells on the fatal influence of this great event in our own country,
in checking, blighting, and distorting the natural progress of things.
But for that influence, he says, the closing years of the century
would probably have seen the abolition of the English Slave Trade, the
reform of Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.[1] The question
of the precise degree of vitality in sectarian pride, and of tenacity
in