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 wrong. It is quite certain that in a really intelligent age so clumsy a system as that of party government will have been relegated to oblivion.

The political machinery to replace it will be of a nature determined by causes much too complex to be foreseen, except in the merest outline, as yet; and probably it will, like most political institutions, be a development rather than an invention. The system, already talked of, by which any matter of great national importance should be made a referendum, the subject of a direct vote by the whole nation, is no doubt capable of ingeniously modified arrangement so as to provide for its expeditious use, without undue interference with the course of ordinary business. But obviously this device is only capable of limited application, and it could not be employed at all, without producing dangerous confusions and incongruities, except in a community whose political education had made strides almost inconceivable in the light of our present limited experience. It is difficult to see how the general legislative business of a considerable nation could be carried on unless by committees of a parliamentary character; and limited as we are by the history of political institutions arising out of states of public intelligence which will have become contemptible in comparison with the intelligence of the next century, there is a