Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/210

198 a provisional and feeble substitute for the universal will. They should not be allowed to persuade themselves that they necessarily represent truth and justice. And they should always remember that they were a minority before they became a majority. It is a law of history that every true and progressive opinion was at first that of a single man, then that of a minority, before it became that of the largest number. There are, then, great chances that the opinion of the future may be residing in one of the minorities that have been overcome by the majority; but in which? It is impossible to know. The error that is passing away and the truth that is coming are both in a minority; and it is precisely because we have no sufficient criterion to distinguish the dawn from the twilight that we content ourselves with the average opinion as offering the least chances of error and the most perfectible elements.

When a decision is to be made, the views of the majority and the minority can not, as we have seen, be reconciled; but, while the matter is under deliberation, they can be compared by giving a representation of all the opinions and permitting their expression. The brain can not decide for two contrary things at once, but it can deliberate over the conflicting views. The case is the same with the kind of national brain called a parliament. Mirabeau has compared representative assemblies to geographical maps, which should reproduce all the elements of the country with their proportions, without permitting the more considerable elements to overshadow the less considerable ones. Now, how far ought the proportionality of representation in such bodies to go? Should it aim at a nearly mathematical exactness, as the partisans of Mr. Mill and Mr. Hare demand? It may help us, in answering this question, to examine the nature and function of the different parties, of which we propose to assure the exact representation. In the view of social science, two kinds of forces are indispensable to the body politic, as well as to every living organism—conservative and progressive forces. These forces are personified in the two great parties that prevail in all modern states—the conservative liberal and the progressive liberal parties. Instead of mutually hating each other, these parties ought to comprehend that they are necessary one to the other, and both to the whole. From a psychological point of view, the state, which is an exaggerated man, and condenses in itself all the living forces of the man, should include simultaneously parties distinguishable from one another by differences corresponding to the successive ages of the individual. M. Bluntschli has constructed a fine psychology of parties, which, however, goes a little too far. Childhood is represented by radicalism. All the thoughts of childhood are for the future. A new world is opened before it, which it believes it can organize according to its fancy. Every formula taught in school seems to childhood a universally applicable truth; the radical thinks the same, and ascribes a magical power to his laws and institutions.