Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/755

Rh Peel, should fail, his attempt, like that of Peel, will have a significance which no momentary failure can annul. It announces the decline of the party system, and the advent, not immediate, perhaps, but still certain, of national government.

It is curious with what implicit faith we have all reposed upon party, as the normal, permanent, and only possible mode of carrying on a free constitution, disregarding not only the objections which reason obviously suggests to the system and the general evidences of its bad effects on politics and political character, but the facts which showed plainly enough that its foundations were giving way, and that, if this was the only basis of government, government was likely to be soon left without a basis.

Burke, in his "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent," has given at once his definition and his defense of party:

To form a rational and moral basis for party, to prevent party from sinking into faction, the party leader from becoming an "impostor," and the "generous contention for power" from degenerating into a "mean and interested struggle for place and emolument," there must be, as Burke says, a particular principle on which the members of the connection are agreed in desiring that government should be carried on. Failing such a principle, party, and the golden haze with which Burke, according to his manner, has surrounded it, vanish, and leave a faction or a void.