centre; but it could only effect decentralization to a slight extent, because the permanent parties continued to exist and to give the cue to the provincial press as well as to that of the capital. In the United States even, where the clearing of a vast continent has brought about, with the aid of the telegraph, the creation of a powerful local press unparalleled in the world, the decentralization of the press is purely nominal, so far as the political tendency is concerned. The great majority of the newspapers, from Maine to Florida, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, are under the sway of one or other of the two great permanent parties, whose word of command is transmitted all along the line. The reader will remember how the head-quarters of the American parties manage, by means of the "patent inside" practice, to secure the publication of the articles they want, even in the prints of the most out-ofthe-way spots. The new method of political action which I advocate will realize the desired decentralization. It will break up the centralizing mould of organized opinion, and will ensure the latter, in the form of single issue associations, manifold centres from which opinion will be projected in its various aspects. And in doing this, it will not only have struck at the centralizing forms, but it will have brought decentralization even into the political preoccupations that fill the life of a community by giving each its autonomy and letting it pursue its ends with its own means. While it will prevent the congestion of opinion, the new method will allow it to reap the full benefit of the useful side of centralized action, namely, the unity of control which makes the efforts converge towards the common object.

The new method, by establishing the principle of autonomy in the government of opinion, will not only have the effect of tempering the despotism of opinion, of decentralizing its power, but it will also enable opinions to come forward with more freedom and to assert themselves with more sincerity. Instead of being jumbled together in an ill-assorted compound and kept mechanically in the fixed grooves of permanent parties, they will be able to combine and recombine at will, according to their natural affinities, in homogeneous categories. A freetrader opposed to the unlimited coinage of silver will no longer be forced to join the protectionist party because the latter has

thought fit to declare against free coinage. An adherent of local veto for the drink traffic will no longer find himself obliged to vote for Irish Home Rule, because the party which supports Home Rule has agreed to take up local veto as well. The questions on which the electors will have to express their opinion being no longer mixed up, everybody will be able to express his opinion frankly and unambiguously. Adherents and opponents of the specified causes on which the electoral battles will be fought will be able to muster separately and without confusion; the taking of the popular vote will no longer be a conjuring trick; the will of the majority will be elicited in a clear and unmistakable manner; it will no longer be necessary to decipher the electoral verdict as if it were a charade or a riddle, its purport will be exactly known. It will no longer be possible, after having raised a McKinley to the presidency in order to stop the Silverites, to take advantage of his championship of protectionism to assert that the country has given a fresh sanction to this policy by recording its votes for this personage, and to enact a still more prohibitive tariff, a Dingley tariff. The result of the national deliberations will be all the more sincere that the questions at issue will not only be raised in a distinct manner, but may always be examined for their own sake and not from the standpoint of the interests of the "party," of the consequences that this or that solution may have for its welfare, for the prestige of its firm, for its future, and I know not what besides.

Stripped of extraneous considerations and restored to their intrinsic importance, political problems will be submitted to and developed before public opinion in a more natural, more spontaneous way, so to speak, than under the present régime, in which they are taken up or dropped by a party according as they can help or impede it in its race for power. Henceforth they will engross opinion to the extent that men's minds, well or ill informed, will be engrossed by them, neither more nor less. It will no longer be possible to hustle public opinion as under the system of permanent parties, where we see the party organizers modify their policy as the manager of a theatre changes his playbill, introduce at a moment's notice new items into their programmes, and thrust them on their followers by the force of party discipline, without giving them

time to grasp the first elements of the problem thus suddenly raised. Deprived of the factitious support of the title of a permanent party, and coming before public opinion in its own name, every problem will necessarily have to appeal to it, to canvass it at more or less length, and therefore to advantage, whether the solution be a positive or a negative one. This ⚫ means that the methods of political propaganda will change. There will be less inducement to resort to those sensational practices which aim at the emotions and the senses, because they will be of less use. Confronted by a particular question, which has to be explained to the multitude, and which in no way involves the fate of a party, politicians will have more need to convert men's minds than to take them by storm in the hurly-burly of the "Chinese business," which "is styled in polite language political education," to use the expression of a dignitary of the American Caucus. The political education of the masses in the true sense of the word will become possible. At present it is a material impossibility, both in point of time and of space. When, from considerations of party tactics, a question is sprung upon the public in view of the next election, there is no time left to convince the electors, even if one wished to do so; all that can be done is to act on their imagination, to impress it by noisy proceedings, in order to carry votes.2 When the question does not arise unexpectedly, when it is not the want of time that is prohibitive, then the crowded state of the composite programme of which it forms part is an obstacle. A permanent party which has set up as general contractor for the political problems awaiting solution is always obliged to deal with several of them at the same time. Now, as John Bright said in a phrase that has passed into a proverb, "You cannot get twenty wagons at once through Temple Bar." We have seen the very party which professes, and with sincerity, the greatest zeal for political 1 See above, Vol. II, p. 366.

2 This is what was said to me in so many words, at the beginning of the presidential campaign of 1896 in the United States, by a member of the National Republican Committee, who was directing the contest in one of the largest States of the Union, classed among the "doubtful" ones: "The silver question will be put on a sentimental basis; the maintenance of the gold standard will be advocated in the name of the national honour; an appeal will be made to popular feeling; there is no time to conduct an educational campaign to persuade people that free coinage is a fallacy."

education, the English Liberal party, grappling with this difficulty. We have seen that it is as impossible for it to enlighten the masses on all questions at once as to select one of them for this purpose and sacrifice all the rest to it. Being unable to make a serious impression on the minds of those whom it wishes to carry along with it, the Liberal Organization is reduced to the resource of "raising enthusiasm."

With the system of temporary single issue organizations all these difficulties disappear. A party will be able, and bound,. to devote itself wholly to making converts to the cause which it is promoting; there will be nothing left for it but to turn propagandist; every inch of ground won by it will be so only through the efforts made to win men's minds. If there are several causes contending for the favour of public opinion, the political education will be carried on with all the more fulness and energy; each of the rival organizations which will represent the various causes will be obliged to make a direct appeal to every intelligence. Political society will be trans-. formed into a vast school, and democratic government will become really a government of discussion. This teaching and this discussion, however numerous the rival organizations conducting them may be, will be free from all confusion; for no organization will ever teach more than one thing at a time, and the subjects taught will be quite optional, once the organization of parties is freed from that method of "cramming" which characterizes the organization of studies in so many educational systems. Appealed to by various causes, the elector will bestow his attention on that which appears to him, rightly or wrongly, as the most important or the most urgent, and will give his vote to the standard-bearer of that cause. The cause which musters the most combatants for and against it, will naturally be first in the electoral steeple-chase. The movements which obtain but few adherents will be last, with liberty to start afresh at the next race in greater strength, if they succeed in making converts. No opinion will be able to thrust itself on the community if it has not conquered the majority of the electorate; but no opinion, no movement, will find itself excluded at the outset, as in the present day, because it does not fit in with the views or the calculations of the existing parties, or because it appears to be premature. Every political

movement, left free, by the new method, to expand like a plant in the sun, will be able to ripen if it has vital force. On the other hand, if it does not arrive at maturity, it will have far more difficulty in asserting itself under the new method, which subjects all opinions to a natural probation unknown to the present system.

The restitution of their autonomy to political problems, while thus contributing to liberate opinion, will not fail to improve those who are supposed to represent it in the State, the politicians, and to bring about generally a marked change in the relations of the electors with their representatives, of the rulers and the ruled. Under the present system of per,manent parties burdened with omnibus programmes, a candidate or a member is, in the very great majority of cases, necessarily a humbug. It is to him that John Bright's sally in the debate on the "minorities clause" applies, he it is "who produces like a conjurer port, champagne, milk, and water out of the same bottle."1 Not only has he to be, in political matters, a sort of doctor de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis, to possess a ready-made solution for all possible problems, but he has to pledge himself to solve these problems, however varied and numerous they may be, at the earliest date. He has to make promises right and left, and as it is impossible for him to keep them, he becomes a professional liar, although at bottom he is perhaps not more dishonest than other men. "Necessity which has no law" impels him, in spite of himself, to disregard truth, sincerity, uprightness. This will be always the case as long as the object is to muster under a common standard and for all time the greatest possible number of electors, without taking into consideration their divergences on many questions; under this system the candidate will always be obliged to hedge continually, to discourage nobody, and to carry on a regular flirtation with every one, with whoever is likely to join the "party." But once the new method will have introduced the grouping of the electors according to the problems of the day, the candidate or the member, instead of playing the part of Molière's Don Juan, will be able and obliged to choose and honourably espouse the cause which he feels capable of defending. He will, of course, be able to

1 See above, Vol. I, p. 111.