Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/761

Rh arrangement of the leaders and wire-pullers, irrespective of all personal connections, would be practically out of the question. Two alternatives will present themselves to the people: either a new mode of working constitutional government and maintaining the proper check on the executive must be found, or the President must be allowed to become something very like an elective dictator for a term of years.

The practice of setting up the offices of the executive as the prize of victory in a legislative contest carried on by the agency of party appears to be injurious alike to legislation and to executive government. It is injurious to legislation, because public men are constantly tempted to deal with legislative questions in the interest of their own ambition, for the purpose of paving their way to office, or strengthening their position there, not with a view to the proper objects of legislation; whence a number of unnecessary, premature, and dishonest measures. All the members of the Conservative party, before 1867, had recorded their opinions against a large extension of the franchise as tending to place political power in ignorant and irresponsible hands. They, then, to keep their party in office, and at the bidding of leaders who they knew had no other motive, themselves extended the franchise to the most ignorant and irresponsible part of the population, the populace of the towns. The practice is injurious to executive government, because it excludes or ejects from office the ablest and most trusted administrators on account of opinions respecting legislative questions which in no way affect administration. It wrongly unites, in short, two political functions which are perfectly distinct and which mutually suffer by being bound up with each other.

It is needless to dilate upon the relations of party, its machinery, its strategy, the press which serves it and expresses its passions, to public morality and the general interests of the state; the facts are always before our eyes. But experience of a colony or of some new country is needed to make one thoroughly sensible of the effects of this warfare upon the political character of the people, and of the extent to which it threatens to sap the very foundations of patriotism and of respect for lawful authority in their minds.

It is supposed that the hostile vigilance of party is the great safeguard against political corruption, and one which, if removed, it would be impossible to replace. But there are some countries at least in which the indiscriminate slander in which party constantly deals forms really a cloak of darkness for all corruption rather than a lantern for the detection of any; while its effect on the character of public men is to produce general lowness of tone and brazen indifference to accusations of every kind. The experiment has not yet been tried of legislating definitely against the corrupt use of legislative or executive power, which is a perfectly tangible crime (at least it is difficult to see why the sale of a vote in a legislative assembly, or of a government contract, is not as tangible a crime as the fraudulent breach of an