Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/757

Rh Some astronomers say that the moon once had an atmosphere, but that she has exhausted it, and that she shows us what our planet will be when, in the course of ages, its atmosphere also shall have been exhausted. The colonies, in this matter of party government, may furnish an indication of the same kind to the mother-country. In Canada, for example, while New World society was struggling to repel the intrusive elements of the old régime forced upon it by the imperial country, and to extort self-government, the parties, though not altogether edifying in their behavior or salutary in their influence upon popular character, were at least formed upon real lines. But the struggle ended with the abolition of the state Church and the secularization of the clergy reserves. Since that time there has been no real dividing line between the parties; they have ceased to be truly directed to public objects of any kind; their very names have become unintelligible. Politics under such a party system must inevitably sink at last into an "interested contest for place and emolument" carried on by "impostors who delude the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and afterward incense them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude." It is needless to say what effects an incessant war of intrigue, calumny, and corruption, carried on by such party leaders, with the aid of the sort of journalists who are willing to take their pay, must produce on the political character of a community, however naturally good, and well adapted for self-government. Nobody is to blame. The blame rests entirely on the system. Lord Elgin found fault with Canadian parties for being formed with reference to petty objects, not to great questions. It is singular that so acute a man should not have asked himself where the great questions were to be found. Were they to be manufactured or imported?

Nothing is more curious than the ingenuity with which new reasons are invented for old institutions when the original reasons have ceased to exist. The advocates of the party system in countries destitute of party questions, at a loss for rational grounds of defense, take a desperate dive into psychology, and affirm that all men are by natural tendency either Conservatives or Liberals, so that the division of every community into two parties is not merely a practical exigency of politics but a general law of humanity. In that case Nature must have been peculiarly kind to certain politicians who are furnished with a double set of tendencies enabling them to appear in both the parties at different periods of their career. It is hardly necessary to prove that the varieties of natural temperament are numberless, and are still further diversified by the influences of position, age, and fortune; and that to divide any nation into two organized parties according to their temperaments would be an undertaking far transcending in absurdity all the fancies of Laputa. Yet such philosophy probably helps to cast a halo over a contest of "impostors,"