To a modern eye the strangest part of all this strange frame of government was the plan of leaving to chance the selection of nearly all officials except those generals for whom military skill was indispensable. Yet the use made of the Lot, as well as the other arrangements described, was deemed to be imposed by the supreme need of averting oligarchy, and still worse, Tyranny, the disease always threatening Greek republics, as it destroyed sixteen centuries later the republics of mediaeval Italy. 1 The vesting of public functions in large Boards instead of in individual officials was meant to make each member a check upon his colleagues. The short terms of office tended to prevent corrupt men from forming secret schemes for robbing the public funds. Thus power was brief as well as limited. The throwing open to every citizen of the right to prosecute officials made the way of transgressors hard, for it turned every ambitious rival into a detective. The Lot itself not only gave each man, however obscure, his chance of office, making him feel his equality with the richest, but threw difficulties in the way of treasonable plots, for those who had to exercise political power together were not, as in modern popular governments, party associates or social intimates, with common aims in view. By all these devices, and also by Ostracism, the power of voting into exile, without any specific charge, a politician whom it was desired to keep away from the city, the Athenians sought to prevent any man from rising markedly above others in influence or power, and if this could not be quite prevented, to reduce his opportunities for doing mischief. And, on the whole, the devices succeeded. It was defeats in war that brought the first democracy to an end. After its re-establishment in 403 B.C. Athens never regained the commanding position she had held in the days of Pericles as the head of a confederacy of subject allies. But though her government was thereafter perhaps less efficient and certainly more offensive to the rich, its democratic character was not seriously endangered during the eighty years that followed down to the melancholy day when Macedonian troops were placed in the port-fortress of Munychia to overawe the people.

Athens lacked, and so did most of her sister republics, some features found in modern free governments. There was no proper judicial establishment, no regular civil service, no permanent military establishment (despite the frequent wars), no organized political parties, little interest in or importance attached to elections to office, and an imperfect constitutional check on the action of the ruling legislature. Executive power was comminuted and distributed among a large number of Boards, each consisting of many persons and restricted to a few special functions. Such a government could hardly have been worked save by a wonderfully keen and active-minded people, whose courage and resourcefulness largely compensated for their instability and deficient respect for authority. They held their ground well against their neighbour and often hostile republics, whose weaknesses were like their own. Had no other foes appeared, the Republics of Hellas might have provided the world with still more to admire, and still more to take warning from. What would the democracy of Athens have become had its quality been tested by another two centuries of life? Would ingenuity and patriotism have discovered remedies for the evils which Aristotle noted? Or would the intensification of that antagonism of Rich and Poor which was already visible in the later days of Plato have led to revolution and the establishment of an oligarchy or even of a tyranny. Unhappily the drama was never played out. After the first three acts, in the first of which Solon, in the second Pericles, and in the third Phocion and Demosthenes played the leading parts, the curtain suddenly fell. The military monarchy of Macedonia, reared by the craft of Philip, and thereafter wielded by the resistless force of Alexander, cut short the free life of Athens. Democracy virtually ended when (in 323 B.C.) Antipater reduced the number of citizens and planted a garrison to control them. Free governments, more or less democratic, remained in some other cities, notably in those of the Achaean League, till they succumbed to Pome. But at Athens, though she continued to be the most famous seat of instruction in philosophy till Justinian closed her schools in A.D. 529, the day of great statesmen, great poets, and great philosophers was gone for ever.

The defects of the Greek Republics have been dwelt upon by a host of writers, who found material for their strictures in the accounts given by the two finest philosophic minds of the ancient world, both of whom lived in Athens and described its democracy in treatises which were the earliest and remain among the most precious contributions ever made to political thought. The judgments of Plato are more severe than those of his great disciple, because he tries what he saw by the standard of that Ideal Polity which he imagines to be stored up somewhere in the heavens, never to become actual on earth till the day comes when philosophers are kings or kings are philosophers,— a day of which not even the dawn is yet discernible. Aristotle applies a standard drawn from the facts of his own time, and he finds Athens rather above than below the average of excellence which its republics presented. The kind of government he sketches as being the best attainable under existing Greek conditions is founded on his observations of the institutions which were working well in various cities, including Carthage (he had unfortunately no data from Rome), and shows that he wished to blend some features of an aristocratic with others of a democratic type. 1 Both philosophers should of course be compared with the contemporary references to the working of democracy to be found in Thucydides and Xenophon and the Attic orators, nor should the plays of Aristophanes, albeit caricatures, be omitted. From all these sources we get a vivid picture of public life in the most keen-witted, versatile, and inventive community the world has ever seen, men whose achievements in art and literature are models for all time. The Athenians had no doubt the defects of their qualities. But what qualities!

A farewell glance at the salient features of their public life shows us a whole people always busy, or supposed to be busy, directing and administering their State in the Assembly, in the Council and its Committees, in the law Courts, in the various other bodies, Thesmothetai, Nomothetai, and the numerous smaller Boards. Most citizens had at some time or other filled some office, and everybody was paid, even for attending the Assembly. But the Athenians were also fond of talking and fond of amusement. The ideal of a steady and strenuous co-operation of all citizens in the daily duties of government was far from being attained in practice. State work was compatible with laziness. 1 The average man loved oratory and was readily moved by it, was clever enough to enjoy its brilliance and not quite wary enough to discount its artifices. Its sway was tempered only by bribery and by the fear of a prosecution for having misled the people.

Gathered in their Assembly the citizens were hasty and variable, easily swept off their feet by passion, unable to pursue a fixed foreign policy, unless they found a Pericles or a Phocion whom they had grown to trust as both sagacious and incorruptible. Impatient of restraints, even such restraints as they had by law imposed upon themselves, they ruled as a despot rules, exemplifying the maxim that no one is good enough to be trusted with absolute power. Demos, says Aristotle, is the sole sovereign, Demos becomes a Tyrant.

The spirit of independence, the love of equality, and the dread of an ambitious usurper made them trust their magistrates with so little power that in many branches of administration there was no permanent control, no fixed policy, no means of throwing responsibility on any one for the neglect to take action when needed or to provide precautions against impending danger. But when roused they could put forth efforts worthy of heroes, manning their fleets with splendid celerity and throwing their hearts into combat.

In their relations with other States they showed that deficient respect for the rights of others, and for liberty as a principle, which belonged to every Hellenic community. There was little chivalry or love of justice where strangers were concerned, and no love of peace. Among the Greeks, patriotism sometimes reached its highest, and sometimes fell to its lowest level. There were men who willingly died for their city. There were others, sometimes of the most brilliant gifts, who, like Themistocles and Alcibiades, did not hesitate, when exiled, to do their utmost to injure it. The power of money and the greed for money appears from the prevalence of bribery and the frequent embezzlement of the public funds. These Republics did not live by Virtue. Rather might one say that they lived by disbelief in it.

If the faults enumerated constitute a grave indictment of Greek democracy, let no judgment be passed till Greek oligarchy also has been examined. It had few of the merits and all the faults of democracy, except perhaps in the sphere of foreign relations, for in these policy is usually more consistent and foreseeing when directed by the Few rather than the Many. In the oligarchic cities there was less security for property and for personal liberty, and far less chance of justice, for the rulers took without scruple what they wanted, and everything went by favour. Oligarchs were as corrupt and more rapacious than any body could be in a democracy. The common man could not count on his own safety or on the honour of his family. Seditions and conspiracies were frequent, for not only did the mass of the people try to overthrow the oligarchs,— who, with the Greek aversion to compromise, did not, like the patricians of old Rome, know when to yield in time,— but the dominant families themselves quarrelled and fought against one another. Aristotle condemns the rule of the Few as more pernicious than the rule of the Many. The only thing worse still was Tyranny, for which both he and Plato reserve their blackest colours. Liberty at least, Liberty as the unchecked development of the individual man, was secured by democracy, as Plato recognizes when he condemns its excess. 1

Two facts stand out to the modern historian when he surveys these Republics from afar. One is this. They reached in an early stage of the political development of mankind the high-water mark, attained elsewhere only by the primitive communities of Switzerland, in the uncontrolled sovereignty of the whole people, and in the rule of the Average Man. If it was not a success, it was more successful than could well have been expected. The value of the lesson for moderns is no doubt reduced by the fact that the communities were small and that the lowest stratum of the population consisted chiefly of slaves. Yet high is the value that remains.

The other fact is that after all the changes of seventy-five generations the tendencies of human nature remain substantially what they were. Nowhere else do we find so vivid and various a record of these tendencies in their full and free play, embodied as they are in striking characters and dramatic situations. To those experiments in the government of the people by the people which the Greeks were the first to try, they brought an incomparable eagerness and resourceful ingenuity. Their fitful life, filled with wars and conspiracies and revolutions, was illumined by a blaze of poetry, philosophy, and art, which no subsequent age has equalled. Short indeed was the life of these republics, but it was intense, and it was wonderfully fruitful for all later generations. It has for us the unfading charm of showing human thought and passion in their primal simplicity. The stream, still near its source, runs with the clearness of a mountain spring welling up from the deep recesses of the rocks. We see men as Nature made them, obeying their first impulses, ardent and curious, full of invention, full of imagination. We see them unfettered by traditions and recollections, unguided by settled principles, without the habits and prejudices and hesitations which the memories of past failures implant, weaving theories, enriching the world with ideas and maxims as they move onward in the confident joyousness of youth.

CHAPTER XVII: the republics of spanish america

The Western hemisphere contains (besides the United States) twenty Republics, in all of which (except French-speaking Haiti and Portuguese-speaking Brazil) Spanish is the language of the dominant white race. 1 None of these States has had one hundred and thirty years of life, but into that short period they have crowded a series of vicissitudes and experiences which, for their number and the light they throw upon certain phases of human nature in politics, find a parallel only in the republics of ancient Greece and in those of mediaeval Italy. They have, however, received little attention from European historians, and still less from political philosophers. Most writers have been content to refer to them as awful examples of what befalls people who have cast themselves loose from monarchical institutions. Even Sir Henry Maine in his ingenious but elusive book on Popular Government (published in 1885) did not hesitate to make them the basis of his case against democracy. Now, whatever one might call them, they were certainly not democracies thirty-five years ago, and only two or three could be called by that name now. Plato and Aristotle would have described them as forms of Tyranny, i.e. illegal despotisms resting on military force. An account of them may, therefore, seem to lie outside the province of the present treatise. Nevertheless they deserve attention here, for they indicate what happens when an attempt is made to establish popular self-government where the conditions necessary for its working are absent, and they also show, per contra, how a change in economic environment may bring about an improvement in political capacity, and lead communities towards a peaceful constitutionalism, even where intellectual and moral progress lag behind the advance in material prosperity.

When the colonial dominions of Spain began from A.D. 1810 onwards to throw off the yoke of the old Spanish monarchy, which had governed them with incomparable selfishness and stupidity, there were only two regions in which the bulk of the population was of European stock. These were the regions which are now Argentina and Uruguay, in each of which the native Indian tribes, though warlike, were few in number and so unfit to resist their conquerors that they had before the middle of the nineteenth century been either killed off or imperceptibly absorbed into the whites. In all the other States that arose on the ruins of the old Viceroyalties the pure European element was small, ranging from 5 to 10 per cent, the rest of the population being either pure Indian, speaking native languages, or of mixed blood, speaking Spanish. Political action existed only among the first and last of these classes, for the aborigines were either serfs working for Spanish masters on plantations or in mines, or else had remained in a tribal state, some of them practically independent, like the famous Mapoches (Araucanians) of Southern Chile and the warlike clans of Northern Mexico. Thus for the purposes of politics, those who may be called “the citizens” were only a small fraction, and in some regions an extremely small fraction, of the whole population. 1

Since 1810 there has been much progress in parts of tropical America. But the population, such as it was and is, remains, in most States, scattered thinly over a vast area. Those of European stock, and those of mixed blood called mestizos, live mostly in small towns, lying far apart and separated by arid deserts or by densely-wooded tropical wildernesses in which man can scarcely make head against the forces of Nature. Railways (except in the temperate and well-peopled south 1 ) are still few, and some large tropical areas remain almost unexplored. Not only the natives but a large part of the mestizos have continued in unlettered ignorance. They are citizens only in name, knowing nothing and caring nothing, except in a few cities, of what passes in the sphere of government.

There is no marked social distinction between the families of European race and the educated mestizos, and these two classes have little in common with the much larger mass of the aborigines. Every now and then an Indian of exceptional gifts, like Benito Juarez in Mexico, rises out of that mass to the top, and shows himself the intellectual equal of the white man. But otherwise the severance is complete, for the mestizo reckons himself a white, while the Indian remains an Indian, and in many districts practically a heathen in his beliefs, though he may worship saints and go to mass. 2

The inhabitants of these Spanish colonies began their career as independent States without political training or experience. There had been no national and very few local institutions through which they could have learnt how to manage their own affairs. Spain had not given them, as England had given to her North American colonies, any town meetings, any municipal councils, any church organizations in which the laity bore a part. Associative bonds to link men together did not exist, except the control of the serf by his master. There were regions in which society, hardly advanced from what it had been in mediaeval Europe, did not possess even tribal communities much less any feudal organizations, such as those out of which European kingdoms developed. There was, in fact, no basis whatever for common political action, so the brand-new constitutions which a few of the best-educated colonial leaders had drafted on the model of the United States Constitution did not correspond to anything real in the circumstances of these new so-called republican States.

The long guerilla warfare, in the course of which the insurgent colonists had worn out the resources of Spain till she gave up the contest in despair, had implanted in all these countries military habits, had made the soldier the leader, had accustomed the inhabitants to the rule of force. No one thought of obeying the law, for there was no law except on paper. Force and force only counted. The constitutions had provided elected presidents and elected legislatures, and courts of law, but what were such institutions without the sense of legal right, the means of enforcing it, and the habit of obedience to legally constituted authority?

These things being so, nearly all of these new States, except Chile, lapsed into a condition of chronic revolution. The executive head was of necessity a soldier, obliged to rule by the sword. If he ruled badly, or made himself otherwise unpopular, it was by the sword that he had to be overthrown. Military talent, or even fierce and ruthless energy without conspicuous talent, brought men to the front, and made them, under the title of President, irresponsible dictators. They were not necessarily wicked men, as were most of the Greek tyrants. They were what most fighting rulers almost inevitably become in such conditions, hard, selfish, and unscrupulous, because they live in the midst of violence, and can prevail only by a severity which in the more brutal natures passes into cruelty.

Although these Presidents were mere despots, the newly-formed States continued to be called Republics, and purported to be living under their formally enacted constitutions. The farce of electing a President was observed. The reigning potentate who bore that title usually secured his own re-election, or might occasionally put in a dependant to keep the place warm for him till he resumed official control. Sometimes, when he had accumulated and invested in Europe a sufficiently large fortune, he transferred himself, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, to Paris, to enjoy the evening of his days by spending there his ill-gotten gains. So, too, there was a legislature, usually of two Houses, elected for the prescribed legal term, but at the bidding of the President, who made sure of an ample majority, either by force or by fraud. The judges were his creatures placed on the bench to do his bidding, and allowed, when he had no orders to give, to levy toll upon or accept “gratifications” from the suitors. It was seldom necessary to lay heavy taxation on the citizens, because the dictator found it easier to raise, by loans in Europe at high rates of interest, the money wherewithal to pay his troops or, if he cared for the development of the country, to construct harbours and railways. That a load of debt was thus imposed on his successors was of no concern to him, though it sometimes embroiled them with European governments unwise enough to take up the cause of the creditors. Meanwhile, what of the people? The great bulk were indifferent, for the recurring revolutions scarcely affected them, and administration was no better and very little worse under one dictator than under another. Politics were left to knots of intriguers and adventurers in the capital and a few other towns, while the rest of the better-educated class pursued the even tenor of their way on their plantations or in the petty commerce of the interior, since overseas trade was in the hands of foreign merchants, at first mostly British, afterwards German also, established at the seaports. The great mass of the aborigines and the poorer mestizos scarcely knew of the political changes except when some army or marauding band swept past them, levying contributions on its way. The small armies who followed a revolutionary leader and maintained an intermittent civil war were chiefly composed of Indians, forced into the ranks or taking service at low pay, and officered by men of Spanish or mixed blood. They fought fiercely, as was shown by a loss of life in the battles which was large in proportion to the numbers engaged. 1 Military habits were kept up not merely by internal but also by international strife, for some of the republics were often at war with their neighbours, the Northern States fighting on land, while Chile and Peru fought at sea also, each bringing its ironclad warships from Europe. The civil war involved no political principles except to some extent the interests of the Church, which divided men in the Caribbean States, and to some extent also in Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, and Uruguay. I say “the Church” and not Religion, for as the whole population was, till a comparatively recent time, Roman Catholic in outward profession, the strife had nothing to do with doctrine but only with ecclesiastical privilege. In Mexico there was a strong clerical and latterly also a strong anti-clerical party. Not till the overthrow of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, whom Louis Napoleon had in a luckless hour placed on the tottering throne of Mexico, did the anti-clericals under the native Indian Juarez win a decisive victory. Strangely enough, the racial issue between Indians and Europeans was hardly at all involved. The aboriginal populations, though they had retained a sullen aversion to the descendants of those Conquistadores who had followed Cortes or Pizarro, were too depressed and too unorganized to be able to act together or find capable leaders. Their last effort had been made in the great insurrection of the Peruvian Tupac Amaru (in 1781), which was suppressed with hideous cruelty by the Spanish viceroy of that now distant day.

Through this long welter of revolutions and dictatorships there appeared no men comparable for statesmanship or military genius, or for elevation of character, to the two heroes who won independence from Spain, the Venezuelan Bolivar and the Argentine San Martin. Conditions did not favour the growth of large minds animated by high purposes. But there were plenty of men of force and daring. Francia in Paraguay and Rosas in Argentina are conspicuous examples of strong dictators ruling by terror, who did nothing to help their countries forward. Barrios in Guatemala, who, like Louis XI. of France, is said to have carried his captives about in cages, has left the greatest reputation for cruelty; and Zelaya of Nicaragua, driven out by the United States a few years ago, is probably the last who maintained the tradition of torture. The lowest depth of savagery was reached in the Republic of Haiti, an almost purely negro country since it was lost to France in 1803. 1

This state of things has lasted down to our own day in most of the twenty Republics, though of course in very varying degrees. The Caribbean States of Central and Northern South America (excepting Salvador and Costa Rica, but including Ecuador) have, together with Haiti, been on the lowest level. Salvador, Bolivia, perhaps Colombia and Peru also, and now even Paraguay, slightly affected by its southern neighbours, are better. Cuba and San Domingo, under the protecting and steadying influence of the United States, are better still. Whether better or worse, however, and by whatever name the governments of these States may be called, none of them is a democracy. But it is one of the oddest instances of the power of a word that the less educated and even many of the more educated persons among the free nations have continued, especially in the United States, to believe them to be, because called “Republics,” entitled to a confidence and sympathy which would not be given to a military tyranny under any other name. Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil belong to a different category. They are true Republics, if not all of them democracies, and each requires a short separate treatment.

Chile has had a history unlike that of the other States. She has been from the first a constitutional Republic, some of whose features recall the oligarchy that governed England during the reigns of the two first Georges. Blessed by a temperate climate, a long stretch of sea-coast and (in her southern regions) a continuous cultivable area sufficient to support a large agricultural and pastoral community, every part of the country being in touch by sea with every other part, she has also enjoyed the advantage of possessing both a native and a Spanish stock of unusually sound quality — the Spanish settlers having mostly come from Northern Spain, many of them Basques, while the native Indians, though less advanced towards civilization than were the Peruvians, were of stronger fibre, as was proved by the valiant resistance of the never-conquered Araucanians. There is a good deal of pure European blood left in Chile, and the mixed race is both manly and industrious, with much independence of character. The leading families, holding considerable estates, have formed a sort of territorial oligarchy, keeping the government in their hands and getting on well with the peasantry, who, content to be guided by them in political matters, usually vote with their landlords. Though public peace was sometimes troubled in earlier days, the last sixty years have seen only one serious civil war, that of 1891 between President Balmaceda and the Assembly, in which the latter prevailed; and the Republic has seldom had to fear conspiracies or revolts. The army and navy have been kept highly efficient. The machinery of the constitution, under which the suffrage has been extended to include practically all adult males, an experiment which some Chileans have deemed premature, seems to work pretty smoothly. The President appoints and dismisses the ministers who are nevertheless held responsible to the legislature. Votes are honestly counted, but there is said to be a good deal of electoral corruption, though, as it is not confined to any one party, it does not prevent the general result from conforming to public opinion. 1 A system of proportional representation adopted some time ago appears to give satisfaction. The public credit has always been carefully guarded, so much so indeed that, during the civil war above referred to, both the contending parties tendered to the European bondholders the interest due upon the national debt. The men who lead in public affairs have been, as a rule, persons of standing and reputation in the country as well as of statesmanlike capacity. Neither Senators nor Deputies receive a salary.

Argentina, which had made a good beginning in the early days of the War of Independence when led by San Martin and Belgrano, relapsed after a time into a long period of disorder, and has now emerged therefrom mainly through the working of economic causes. She possesses in her Pampas a vast area of pastoral and arable land, equalled for its productive capacity only by that part of North-Western America which lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Lakes, and by the vast plain between the Irtish and the Middle Yenisei in Western Siberia. She has the further advantage of being peopled by men of an almost pure European stock, two-thirds Spanish, one-third, through recent immigration, Italian. The climate, hot in the tropical North and too cold for cultivation in the Patagonian South, is through most of the territory sufficiently temperate to enable these two South European races to work under the sun, and the industry of the Italians is now emulated by that of the immigrants who have recently flocked in from Spain. While the tyranny of President Rosas lasted, material progress was slow, because internal communications were wanting, and foreigners feared to provide capital for creating them. But in the year that followed his expulsion in 1852 revolutions and civil wars became less frequent, the wild half-Indian Gauchos, from whom the bulk of revolutionary levies had been drawn, having begun to vanish, or be transmuted into peaceful cowboys. Immigration by degrees increased, English companies began to construct railways, the fertile lands were brought under cultivation, exports of hides, wool, and meat grew apace, and the growing trade brought the country within the range of European influences, intellectual as well as commercial. The value of agricultural land rose swiftly, especially after it had been found possible to obtain water from artesian wells in regions without surface streams. Its owners acquired with their accumulating wealth an interest in the tranquillity of the State. Everybody who felt the touch of prosperity — owners, traders, work-people — saw, as they watched a network of railways constructed by British capital spreading over the land, and Buenos Aires expanding into one of the great commercial cities of the world, that prosperity could remain only under stable conditions, which would draw more and more of foreign money and of foreign immigrants to supply the labour needed for the development of the country. The more industry there was, and the more prosperity, the smaller became the proportion of those who joined in revolutions, as men had been wont to do, from the love of fighting or to better their fortunes.

The long-continued antagonism of the provinces to the commercial centre of Buenos Aires gave rise to armed struggles which seem to have now died down. Since 1890 there have been some troubles, yet no serious or widespread disturbance of public peace, and the minds of men have accustomed themselves to constitutional methods of government. The change was marked by the fact that political chiefs who here, as in the other disorderly republics, had been mostly soldiers began to be mostly lawyers. Whoever looks through the annals of South American States will find that nearly every leader bears the title either of General or of Doctor of Laws. After Rosas, arms began to yield to the gown. The Presidents, if not always elected by unimpeachably legal methods, have not been installed by force. The constitutional machine works imperfectly, but it works. The old factions have gone: generals do not plan pronunciamentos: violence is going out of fashion.

The President is chosen by an electoral college modelled on that provided in the United States, and enjoys similar powers, including a veto on legislation which can be overridden by a two-thirds majority. He holds office for six years, is not immediately re-eligible, appoints the ministers who, being responsible to the legislature, countersign all his acts. They cannot sit, but can speak, in either Chamber. The Legislature consists of a Senate of twenty-eight, chosen by the provincial Legislatures and a Chamber of Deputies of one hundred and twenty members, elected, as are the Presidential electors, by universal suffrage, the term of Senator being nine, that of a Deputy four years. The elections used to be largely made by the Government in power, who respected forms by allowing a certain number of their opponents to be returned to the Chamber to discharge the functions of an Opposition, and recently a clause in the Constitution has been severely strained by the practice of what is called Intervention, i. e. the replacement of existing Provincial officials by Federal appointees, so as to enable a majority in the Legislature to be secured for the party to which the President belongs, there being a strong tendency in Spanish America to vote for the party which holds executive power. There seems to be now no taint of force and not much of fraud in the making up of lists and counting of votes; nor does bribery seem to prevail largely. Parties are still fluid and imperfectly organized. They are based less on principles than on attachment to leaders; and the bulk of the citizens showed no great interest in their civic duties until voting was made compulsory by a law of 1912.

The legislators (salary $1500 a month) are not very zealous in the discharge of their duties, and leave much to the President, who is at least as powerful as his prototype in the United States. Countries with only a short experience of constitutional government are apt, as has been recently seen in some of the new kingdoms of south-eastern Europe, to allow the Executive to overtop the Legislature. Municipal administration is described as fairly honest, i.e. there is not very much peculation but plenty of jobbery in the granting of contracts and the execution of local improvements.

The dispensation of justice is a weak point in South American as well as in South European countries. Legal proceedings are dilatory, and the Bench not always trusted, though it sins less by accepting pecuniary inducements than by yielding to the influences of family connection and personal friendship. Order is now tolerably well maintained throughout the country by a police as efficient as can be expected in vast and thinly peopled regions. Dynamite outrages were frequent in Buenos Aires some years ago, but the extremists who resorted to them have latterly been pursuing their aims by means of strikes on a very large scale. Labour unrest is, however, no greater than in Europe and North America, and needs mention only for the sake of indicating that so far from being due to economic distress it is now common in new countries where there is still unoccupied land, and wages have long been high.

The respect for legality and the general tone of public life have been sensibly rising in Argentina. Few of the recent Presidents and ministers have incurred suspicion of malpractices. Whether this can be said of the deputies seems more doubtful. Seditions arising out of angrily contested elections are now confined to cases in which the National Government intervenes because a provincial election is alleged to have been unfairly conducted, and such disturbances do not necessarily spread beyond the particular province. There has been little discontent except among the Socialists and Anarchists of Buenos Aires, for employment and prosperity abound. The increase in the number of small landholders, due partly to the equal division of estates passing by inheritance, partly to rise in the value of land which has led to the breaking up of purchasable estates into lots by industrious immigrants, is making for the stability of government, as it enlarges the class which has a motive for supporting public order.

Nevertheless, although the Government is democratic in form and not palpably undemocratic in practice, the rule of public opinion is not yet fully established. Men's minds are perhaps too much occupied by material considerations, the small cultivator thinking of produce and prices, the rich landowner enjoying the luxurious life of the capital, to give heed to politics. Under such conditions no high level of administration or legislation can he looked for. But this does not reduce the interest which the student of politics finds in watching the growth of institutions, and the development of what used to be a military tyranny into what is becoming a pacific self-governing community. The Argentine democracy, whatever may be the standard of public virtue they maintain, will possess the advantage of being free from external dangers, so that little of the revenue need go to military and naval armaments, and free also from pauperism, so that economic and social problems may be handled without the passion engendered by suffering. Here, as in the Australian States, the predominance of a single great city is too marked. One-fifth of the whole people dwell in Buenos Aires, whose excitable radicalism or socialism is apt to prevail against the more conservative provinces. It is to Argentina what Paris is to France, the centre of literature and the chief maker of public opinion by its ably written and powerful press.

Uruguay is another South American country in which a true republican Government, professing to be, and gradually becoming, a democracy, now exists. Its racial and physical conditions resemble those of Argentina 1 (of which it was at one time a part), and the broad outlines of its history, since it achieved independence, are not dissimilar. It is, however, very much smaller, and is a Unitary, not a Federal State. Its population is almost entirely of European stock, and its national sentiment extremely strong. In it also the progress of material development and the consequent growth of trade with Europe have worked for good. The creation of an excellent railway system, the influx of immigrants from Italy and Spain, the extension of education through a people now settling down to work, have begun to give the inhabitants, who were, till late in the nineteenth century, distracted by civil wars, an interest in order, and honest administration. Thus government has become more constitutional, 2 and elections a better expression of popular sentiment. The Constitution is no longer a sham, though the initiative and power of the President still overshadow the Legislature. The factions that divided the nation since 1825, adherents of two rival Generals, are not yet extinct, one of them having become a more or less clerical, the other an anti-clerical party. In 1910 (when I visited the country) the Whites, enraged at the manipulation of the elections by the Reds, who then controlled the Government, started a short-lived insurrection. But clericalism is fast dying out, and the hereditary traditions of the Whites cannot keep it long alive. The statesman who has practically dominated the country, whether in office as President or out of it, is a person of advanced opinions, eager to try bold experiments which will take the wind out the sails of the (comparatively few) Socialists of Monte Video.

Brazil is (except Cuba, which was abandoned by Spain in 1898) the latest born of all the American Republics, for it retained its connection with Portugal till 1822 and did not dismiss its learned and amiable Emperor Dom Pedro II. till 1889. The change from a monarchical to a republican form did not mean much in substance, for the Crown had exercised very little power, and the masses have exercised quite as little under either name. The chief difference has been that revolts, unknown before, have occurred since, though none has risen to the dimensions of a civil war. The hereditary monarchy had the advantage of offering no occasion for attempts by military adventurers to seize the Presidency by violence, and the ties it maintained with Portugal had enabled European influences to play more freely on the country than was the case with the rest of South America after 1810. Material development has moved faster and political life has been more active under the new Republic, but the country is as far as ever from being a democracy.

Its area (3,300,000 square miles) exceeds that of the United States, but the population (estimated at 26,000,000) is extremely sparse, except in parts of the south and along the Atlantic coast. Most of the interior is a forest wilderness, in which a few towns, chiefly peopled by Indians, stand here and there along the great rivers. Of that population about one-sixth are aborigines, nearly one-third full blacks, another third blacks with more or less admixture of white blood, and a little more than one-sixth pure whites, about half of these of Portuguese stock, the rest Germans and Italians. The vast majority of the negroes and half-breeds are uneducated and below the level of a comprehension of politics or even of their own interests in politics. I mention these facts because they show why government cannot in such a country be really democratic, whatever the electoral suffrage. Power inevitably falls to the intelligent minority.

Brazil is a Federation, and properly so, considering not only its immense extent but the distance from one another of the few more thickly-peopled regions. The State Governments enjoy large powers and pursue their own policies, which are more or less wise according to the character of their respective legislatures, whose composition is better in the temperate Southern States, where the population is mostly white, than in the tropical regions, where a handful of whites control a multitude of coloured people. The Central Government consists of a President, elected for four years by direct popular vote; a Senate, elected for nine years; and a Chamber of Deputies, elected for three years. The suffrage excludes illiterates. The ministers are appointed by the President, are responsible to him, and do not sit in the Legislature. Elections are conducted with little respect for legality, and, when fraud fails to secure the desired result, a resort to force may be looked for. Not long ago the ballot-boxes in one of the greater States were, because it was feared that they would show a majority for a candidate opposed to the Government, seized by a body of police disguised as rioters, carried off to a distance and destroyed, whereupon the Governor of the State exercised his constitutional right of providing for the contingency of a loss of ballots, and appointed a Governmental candidate to the office which the election had been held to fill. There is plenty of ability, and an even greater profusion of oratorical talent, among the legislators, but intrigue rules, and, as M. Clemenceau observed after his visit some ten years ago. “the Constitution enjoys a chiefly theoretic authority.” An exceptionally skilful intriguer may, like the strong leader who lately fell a victim to assassination, be effective master of the country.

The Republic is in fact an oligarchy, not of land-owning families, like that of Chile, but of such among the richer men, whether landlords or heads of industrial, financial, or commercial enterprises, as occupy themselves with politics. Like all oligarchies they use their power for their personal benefit, yet with some regard to national interests also, for the Brazilians are intensely proud of their magnificent country, and claim for it the leadership of South America. But between soaring patriotism and self-regarding schemes the welfare of the masses receives less attention than it needs. Something might be done for local self-government, unfavourable as the conditions are; and a large extension of education is urgently required. The traveller is surprised to find that in a country rich in poets and orators there does not exist any duly equipped university. One is sometimes reminded of the Slave States of the American Union as they stood before the Civil War, where a government nominally democratic was really the rule of a planter oligarchy. It is only thirty-two years since slavery was abolished in Brazil. Were the States of the temperate South, where an industrious population, mainly of European stock, has attained prosperity, to cast themselves loose from the tropical regions in order to form a separate republic, they might create in time a real democracy.

It remains to say a few words about Mexico, the greatest of the northern republics and the one whose prospects of peaceful progress have been most suddenly darkened by recent misfortunes. Much of the country, indeed nearly all the northern territory, is a desert, being part of that arid region which occupies a long strip of North America from Canada to the Tropic of Cancer. Southern Mexico, however, is a land of wonderful natural resources, with a delightful climate on that high tableland where the barbarous tribes of ancient Anahuac were passing into civilization when the process was arrested by the invasion of Hernando Cortes. Nearly two-thirds of the present inhabitants are Indians, many of them still in a tribal state, some few heathens. The rest are mestizos, with about 250,000 of pure or nearly pure Spaniards. The country adopted its first constitution, a Federal one modelled on that of the United States, a century ago; and this instrument, amended in some points, has remained nominally in force ever since, though never put into effective operation. The extinction of the rule of Spain was followed by a long series of civil wars, in which one adventurer after another contended for power, the authority and possessions of the Catholic hierarchy being often involved. The capture and death in 1865 of the unfortunate Maximilian, when the French army that had supported him retired from the country under the menace of interference by the United States, sealed the defeat of the Church, which has never recovered from the blow. Juarez was presently replaced by Porfirio Diaz, who under the title of President ruled as a dictator (with one short interval) for thirty-five years, upholding the Constitution in form, and causing elections to be regularly held, on which occasions the soldiers were directed to drop a few voting papers into the ballot-boxes, lest they should be found empty. 1 Administrative work was conducted, better than ever before, by the Governors of the States under the President's general directions, while the political management of each district was entrusted to a person called the Political Chief ( Jefe politico ). In blood Porfirio was one-half or three-fourths an Indian, but no Spaniard of the Cortes type could have shown higher practical gifts. The country was pacified, brigandage, which had been rife for many years, sternly suppressed, and such of the brigands as survived turned into an efficient local gendarmerie ( Rurales ). Railways and harbours were constructed, mining developed, foreign capital attracted, the finances prudently handled, whatever could promote material development encouraged. The country became safe for travellers, for troops were always promptly despatched to any spot where the telegraph announced an outbreak, and when a robbery occurred the bad characters most likely to have had a hand in it were forthwith shot without trial. Every one extolled the wisdom as well as the energy of the now benevolent autocrat who had outlived the enemies of his earlier years and had ceased to need the methods by which he had reduced their number. He was one of the great men of his time, resolute, clear-sighted, swift in action. He even tried to induce his Legislature to pass measures on its own initiative, but found before long that it was unsafe to leave with them a power they were likely to use unwisely. Unfortunately he did not discern, or at any rate did not attempt, one task of supreme importance. In Mexico, as in most parts of Spanish America, the land (except where occupied by Indians in a quasi-tribal condition) has been since the Conquest in the hands of large proprietors, who work it by native labour. The Indian “peon” is a sort of serf, ill-paid and often ill-treated, discontented with his lot, but not knowing how to improve it. He and the poorer half-breeds, who are landless and little better off than the peon, are the material out of which robber bands and insurgent troops are easily made. It should have been the first aim of a wise policy to settle these people on the land as owners or as peasant cultivators with some security of tenure. The Mexican Indians are intelligent as well as good workers: the Spanish conquerors noted their superiority to the South American aborigines. But Diaz left this problem unsolved. The result was seen when the standard of revolt was raised in 1911, and he, being then over eighty years of age, allowed disorders to spread till he was himself obliged to quit the country, which then relapsed into an anarchy of general pillage and murder by revolutionary bands such as had prevailed before the days of Juarez. Could Diaz have found a successor who while following out his policy with equal energy would have given the land to the people and brought education within their reach, Mexico might within half a century have begun to be fit for constitutional liberty. Now, however, its first need is for a government strong enough to restore and maintain order, and when that has been done, and industry has revived, to remove the causes of economic unrest, give security for the employment of capital, and lay the foundations of local self-government.

The general moral of Spanish American history, for the sake of which these descriptions have been given, is almost too obvious to need stating. Why confer free self-governing institutions on a people unfit to comprehend or use them? The very notion of establishing a government by the votes of citizens and controlling the action of a legislature and an executive by holding the representatives responsible for the use they might make of their power, was not within the horizon of the vast bulk of the colonial subjects of Spain; much less could they work the elaborate machinery of two legislative Houses with an elected President and his Ministers. In such circumstances, power inevitably fell to the Executive head, the person whom the people could see and know, and to whom belonged the command of the army. The interest of the community required that this power, needed for the maintenance of order within and defence against aggression by violent neighbours, should be lodged in one strong hand. To subject it to a legislature of inexperienced and short-sighted men, probably selfish and practically irresponsible, because controlled by no public opinion, was to invite confusion and disaster. The people did not rule in these republics because they could not rule. Whatever the plans of theorists and the exhortations of the wise, every people comes sooner or later to that kind of government which the facts prescribe. Thus a nominally elective Presidency became a dictatorship. As each President was obliged to exceed his strictly legal authority because it would not have enabled him to cope with the situation, the distinction between his legal rights and the powers he was actually exercising was obliterated. He passed into a usurper, ruling and compelled to rule by force, so that those who attacked him by force, with or without a moral justification, could claim a title little worse than his own. The very conception of power de iure had no time to spring up and establish itself in the popular mind, for all power was de facto only. As the generation that had been accustomed to obey the Spanish Viceroys passed away, a new generation grew up accustomed to a régime of force. To create afresh that idea of obedience to duly constituted legal authority which is essential to a democracy was a slow process in a population a large part of which was in every State ignorant and semi-barbarous. In most of the tropical States this process has hardly yet begun; in none, except Chile, has it been quite completed. Regarding the more backward republics, such as Venezuela and Ecuador, and those in Central America, it is difficult to make any prediction. If the Western hemisphere were to-day in sixteenth-century conditions, these countries would probably be seized by some naval power and ruled as subject dependencies, as Holland rules Java and France Madagascar. Since that cannot happen now, we can but put our trust in that vis medicatrix naturae which slowly brings the public opinion of the world to bear upon the regions where its action is most needed. If the political prospects for tropical America seem somewhat more hopeful to-day than they were seventy years ago, it is because economic conditions are improving.

What form of government would have been best suited to these communities after they had expelled the Spanish Viceroys?

Those who look back with the experience of a century can see that the form which was adopted, suggested by the example of the United States Constitution, was unsuitable. No wonder it failed, for the conditions were entirely unlike those which the founders of English colonies in new lands had to their hand. In the temperate parts of North America and in Australia there was no large aboriginal population living in a barbarous or semi-civilized state. The colonizing communities destined to spread out and replenish the regions to be settled were English, carrying with them the habits and traditions of an old political system.

What would have happened if things had been left to take their natural course and no attempt made to imitate the United States Constitution? Among the various lines along which some sort of political organization might have developed itself I may mention three, any one of which might have better conformed to the social and economic conditions of the aboriginal peoples in the tropical regions.

One of these lines would have been the growth of small local, loosely connected or practically independent, communities, some with an urban centre, some semi-tribal, each ruled by a chief (native or mestizo) or by a group of the wealthier and more capable Spanish colonial landholding families. Such families represented the civilizing forces, and would have been obeyed by the Indians, some of whom were their tenants, some otherwise dependent upon them. The rule of the chiefs or oligarchic groups would have been harsh and not very progressive, but there would have been some sort of order, with the chance of a peaceful aggregation of the communities into larger wholes as the country began to be developed and opened up to commerce.

Another possible line of development would have been the transmutation of each Viceroyalty into a sort of monarchy, the head of which would have had a legal power, thus continuing the tradition of obedience to duly constituted authority. Law and Fact would have been in a truer relation than under a government professing to depend on a popular election, which must obviously be a farce under the existing conditions. For the success of such a scheme there would have been needed in each country a man not only of force but of some statesmanlike quality and some military talent. It might have failed, as it failed when tried in Mexico. But it would have had at least as good a chance as the plan of representative bodies nominated by presidents who were usurping dictators.

A third form would have been that of an oligarchy composed of the leading families of the country. This came to pass, and has worked with comparatively little friction, in Chile, where no doubt the conditions were exceptionally favourable. It would have been difficult in Peru and Bolivia and Venezuela, owing (among other things) to the wide empty spaces between the small centres of population, and impossible in such a country as Haiti, where there were no families superior in knowledge and vigour to the ignorant and semi-savage masses. But in most of the countries it would have corresponded better to the elements of strength which the actual conditions presented, elements capable of governing and interested in good government, than did a sham Republic under the pretended control of an nominally elected Legislature. Such an oligarchy would have been likely to pass naturally, in the fulness of time and under the influence of the Time-Spirit, into a more popular form of government.

These are speculations. But about the moral of the whole story there is no question. Do not give to a people institutions for which it is unripe in the simple faith that the tool will give skill to the workman's hand. Eespect Facts. Man is in each country not what we may wish him to be, but what Nature and History have made him.

One question remains. What is likely to be the future of these new republics, and what the prospect that they will in time become true democracies? To answer this question let us see what have been the forces which have enabled some among the Republics to achieve real progress during the last half-century.

Chief among these has been the development in each country of its material resources. The growth of wealth through agriculture and mining has increased the number of persons interested in order and good government, and has led to the improvement of roads, railways, internal steam navigation. Education has followed, though slowly; universities have been founded; an indigenous literature has sprung up. Intercourse with foreign countries has grown, and has brought not only those loans which, though perhaps indispensable, were often a source of temptation, but also the ideas and mental habits of Europe and the United States into the Spanish American population. As the traditions of violence and disorder died down, free institutions and the way to work them began to be understood. Power passed peaceably from one president to another. The General is being replaced by the Doctor of Laws, and the man of law, even if he be tricky, is less dangerous than the man of the sword. Fraud is better than force, because fraud, however odious, does not disturb public order, and it is easier to prevent its recurrence than to break the habit of insurrection. It is in this way that Argentina and Uruguay have within the last forty years become politically civilized, and indeed more civilized than some States of Europe. In Mexico material progress had gone so far that if Porfirio Diaz, or a ruler of equal gifts, could have reigned for another forty years, and had grappled with the Indian question, the country might have been where Argentina and Chile are now. Bolivia has advanced, and in Brazil the southern states at least are capable of working a genuine popular government. Those who understand what South America had been under the Viceroys and what she was when she emerged from the long struggle for independence will not despond of her future.

CHAPTER XVIII: land and history

Among the countries in which popular government prevails, France is in two respects unique. She adopted democracy by a swift and sudden stroke, without the long and gradual preparation through which the United States and Switzerland and England passed, springing almost at one bound out of absolute monarchy into the complete political equality of all citizens. And France did this not merely because the rule of the people was deemed the completest remedy for pressing evils, nor because other kinds of government had been tried and found wanting, but also in deference to General abstract principles which were taken for self-evident truths. Frenchmen have always shown, along with their gift for generalizing, an enjoyment of and a faith in general theories beyond that of the other free peoples. Thus the philosophical student of human institutions who desires to test political principles by their results finds a peculiar interest in examining the politics of France, for it is there, even more than in America, that the doctrines on which democracy is founded have told most upon the national mind, and been most frequently pushed to their logical conclusions. The history of the three Republics that have successively arisen since 1792 covers only sixty years in all. But within that space of time France has passed through many phases and tried many experiments. There has been much brilliant oratory, and endless political ingenuity. No period in history throws more light not only on the contrasts of theory with practice, but upon the tendencies which move and direct human society.

As the student of the contemporary politics of a country must everywhere try to understand the conditions, natural and historical, amid which the form of government was established and is being now worked, so nowhere is such knowledge more essential than when one comes to speak of France. We shall see that Nature has given her many things favourable to material prosperity and to immunity from external attack, while the course of her history has produced economic and social conditions which have profoundly influenced her political development.

Let us begin by glancing briefly at the physical features of the country, and then examine more at length the historical antecedents which still affect the State and its government.

France is naturally the richest of European countries, with everything needed to secure the well-being of an industrious people. 1 Nearly all the soil is available for cultivation, or for pasture, or for the growth of timber. There is plenty of coal and iron, chiefly in the north-east, fisheries on the coasts, a climate eminently fitted for cereals in the north and centre, and for vines in the centre and south, as well as for fruits and other less important agricultural products. The country is washed by three seas, giving admirable facilities for commerce, and is guarded on the south and south-east by lofty mountains difficult to traverse. Only the north-eastern land frontier is exposed to attack and has most frequently suffered from it. The compactness of its territory, traversed by no ranges high enough to interfere with free communication, made Gaul appear to be one country even in the days of Julius Caesar, and has enabled its people to attain, despite differences of racial origin which survive in differences of language, a more complete national unity than exists in Germany or Italy or Spain. 2

The wealth derived from the soil and from the industrious habits of the people gave France in the Middle Ages a place in commercial development hardly second to that of Italy. Prosperity brought in its train comforts and luxuries beyond those of her Teutonic neighbours to the north and east. She rivalled Lombardy and Tuscany in the skill and taste of her artificers, qualities which have been so well maintained that she continues to be the purveyor for the whole world of articles of beauty. The arable and vine or fruitgrowing regions, well suited for petite culture, are very largely in the hands of small landowners, and both these and the tenant farmers have formed habits of thrift by which the pecuniary resources of the nation have been increased and pauperism kept within narrow limits. Though a large manufacturing population has sprung up in the mining districts and great cities, the bulk of the nation is still agricultural, with the solid qualities and conservative instincts which everywhere belong to that class. A larger proportion of the total wealth of the country is to be found in the hands of men with small incomes than in any other great European or American country.

Long as France has obeyed one government, there are marked differences between the races that compose the nation — Teutonic Flemings in the north-east with other Teutons on the eastern border, a strong infusion of Norse blood in Normandy, pure Celts still speaking a Celtic tongue in Brittany, Iberian and possibly Ligurian elements in the south. These differences, however, which are as marked as those between the races that inhabit the British Isles, cause no political dissensions, serving rather to give variety, and the richness that comes from the presence of diverse elements, to the people as a whole. This variety, noteworthy in the literature of France, is no less evident in French politics. Her statesmen show several types of character, two of which are especially conspicuous, the man of the north or east, and the man of the south — the former more measured and cautious, the latter more impulsive and brilliant. These differences, however conspicuous in their extreme forms, are less significant than the intellectual character and habits of feeling and acting which have now come to belong to the nation as a whole: quickness of intelligence, a gift for oratory and a sense of style, together with a susceptibility to emotion not incompatible with shrewdness and a conservative prudence in affairs. It was the French love of knowledge and aptness for speculation that made the schools of Paris foremost among the great universities of the Middle Ages, and led mediaeval writers to place in France the local home of Learning (Studium), as they assigned Priesthood (Sacerdotium) to the Italians and Imperium to the Germans. 1

CHAPTER XIX: the frame of government: president and senate

The Constitution of the French Republic is a Rigid one, distinguished from other laws by the fact that it is not changeable by ordinary legislation, but only by a special method to be hereafter described. In this it differs from the constitutions of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries, for in all these countries the laws which regulate the structure and powers of government are not marked off from other statutes. It is not, however, set forth in a single instrument like the Rigid or Written Constitutions of the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, but is contained in three Constitutional Laws.

One of these (Feb. 1875), assuming the President of the Republic as an official then existing under a law of 1873, enacts the method of electing him and his functions, and the mode of amending the Constitution. Two others of 1875 (one since partially repealed) deal with the legislature and the relations of the public powers, while two amending laws of 1884 introduce certain changes. The result of these enactments taken together is to create a legislature consisting of two Houses, a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies, who have the power (a) of electing, in joint session of both Houses, by an absolute majority, the President of the Republic, and (b) of changing the Constitutional Laws, not by the ordinary action of the legislature in each Chamber, but when sitting together in one body as a National Assembly. To enable them so to meet, each Chamber must have separately, either on its own motion or at the request of the President, declared, by an absolute majority, the need for a revision of those laws. 1 A later Constitutional Law (1884) provides that “the principle of the government cannot be the object of a proposal of revision.” 1

The provisions of the Constitution need not be set out in detail here, since they will appear in the description (to be hereafter given) of the Executive and Legislative organs. It is only matters relating to the structure and functions of the government that are dealt with in the Constitutional Laws. There are no broad declaration of political principles, such as appeared in the many earlier Constitutions of France, 2 no restrictions on the action of the legislature, nothing like what Americans call a Bill of Rights, guaranteeing those elementary and inherent rights of the individual which no power in the State is permitted to infringe. Taken together, these Constitutional Laws constitute the shortest and simplest, the most practical and the least rhetorical, instrument of government that has ever been enacted in France. Moreover — and this is a point of special interest to those who insist upon the sovereignty of the People — the National Assembly which passed these enactments in 1875 had received no mandate or commission from the French electorate to do so. It had been elected hastily, during the continuance of the war of 1870–71, in order to create an authority legally capable of making peace with Germany. As there did not then exist any authority competent to prescribe a suffrage for the election, recourse was had to the suffrage established during the Second Republic (1848–1852) which had been overthrown by Louis Napoleon. Neither this Assembly of 1871 nor any subsequent legislature has ever submitted for approval by a vote of the people the Constitutional Laws of 1875, and the question of so submitting them has been seldom raised, no one knowing what the result of a submission might be.

These features of the existing Constitution were due to those political conditions of 1875 which have been already described. In the one-chambered Legislature of that time the deputies who favoured a monarchical government and who had been hurriedly elected under the pressure of a terrible war, held a majority, but they were divided into three groups, Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, corresponding to the three monarchies that had ruled in France; and each of these groups distrusted the others. Thus while the Republicans, though divided internally, were able to work together for some sort of republic, whatever character might subsequently be given to it, the Monarchist groups, each attached to one of several persons whose claims seemed irreconcilable, failed at the most critical moments to combine, and so drifted into a Republic which none of them desired. No party in the Chamber was strong enough to get all that it wanted: each had to consent to a compromise which it meant to be purely provisional. The more advanced Republicans acquiesced in a conservative Republic because they expected to change it in a radical direction. The Monarchists acquiesced in a seven-year Presidency, called a Republic, because they hoped thereafter to turn the President into a King or an Emperor.

CHAPTER XX: the chamber of deputies

Of the laws which regulate the election and powers of the Chamber, those only which provide for its election by manhood suffrage, and determine its relations to the President and the Senate, form a part of the Constitution. Ordinary laws have supplied the rest, directing that the Chamber is to be elected for four years, and fixing its number, which is at present 626, of whom 24 represent Alsace-Lorraine, while 6 come from Algiers and 10 from various colonies. The normal electoral area had been, since 1889, the Arrondissement, a division of the Department for local administrative purposes; but now the Department has been substituted, the voting for the numerous candidates being by a form of proportional representation tried for the first time in 1919. Under this new plan, however, the strength of each party in the Chamber does not exactly represent the strength of the parties in the nation. It was adopted as a compromise between the opponents of proportional representation and those of its advocates who desired to see their principle more boldly applied, and the latter think it has not gone far enough. Registration is performed by the local authorities. They have been known to falsify the register, but this is not common enough to be a serious evil. A man with more than one place of residence can choose at which he will vote, no one being permitted to vote in more than one area whether for the Chamber or for local purposes.

France has tried many electoral experiments in the arrangement of constituencies. Three times she established the system of making the larger area of the department the electoral division, assigning to each department a number of seats based on its population, for all of which the voting took place together on one list, with a second balloting where no candidate obtained an absolute majority. This plan is called the Scrutin de liste. Three times this method was dropped and replaced by the Scrutin d'arrondissement (the scheme of one-membered constituencies). Now the Scrutin de liste has returned once more. Gambetta, among others, supposed that the larger electoral area would tend to raise the quality of candidates and diminish the power of local cliques and wirepullers, but this did not prove to be the case. Whether it will do so now remains to be seen. 1

The election arrangements are comparatively simple and inexpensive, and in rural areas the polling-places are numerous, there being one in every commune. It is usually the hall of the Mairie. Polling always takes place on a Sunday. The machinery of the polling and counting are a public charge, nor is there any legal maximum fixed for the candidates' expenses. Voting is by ballot, supposed to be secret, but in the rural communes the Maire can usually see how the peasant votes, and the peasant generally believes that his vote is known to the priest, the school teacher, and the landlord. Election frauds are not very frequent, though sometimes gross. They generally take the form of dropping into the ballot-box, probably with the collusion of the presiding officer, two or three extra voting papers concealed within the single paper which the voter hands to that functionary. Pleasant anecdotes are told of the way in which these things are sometimes done in southern France. On one occasion the clerk of the Maire, finding that the votes given were not sufficient to elect the candidate desired, remarked to his subordinate, “It is for you to complete the work of universal suffrage.” Disturbances sometimes occur in which the ballot-boxes are seized by a group of rowdies, carried off and tampered with, but this is rare, and seems to be known only in the hot-headed south.

Bribery is sporadic, thought necessary in some places because otherwise the voters will not come up, and in other places useless because it would make no difference to the result. It seems less frequent than it was in England before the Corrupt Practices Act of 1882, or is now in some parts of the United States and Canada. Sometimes men defend or excuse it as a counterpoise to the exercise of undue influence by officials or (formerly) by ministers of religion. “Treating,” which is delicately described as “libations at the expense of the candidate,” is infrequent, though the village cabaret is usually the meeting-place of political committees. An experienced friend told me that illicit expenditure could hardly be a growing evil, for the tendency had of late years been to an increase of the votes given for candidates of advanced opinions, who are nearly all poor men, unable to spend money on elections, and receiving little or no help from party funds. 1 Neither is there now in most parts of France any intimidation worth regarding by employers or landowners, though meetings are sometimes broken up and the polls disturbed by the violent opponents of a candidate. There are districts, however, especially in the west, where the landlord does exert influence on the tenant, and the master on the workman, and the priest on the parishioner. 2 Clerical persuasion no longer takes illegitimate forms. The force that may seriously pervert elections is the quiet pressure of local functionaries under the direction of their superiors or at the bidding of the sitting deputy. 3 Though there are not to-day any “official candidatures,” such as those which were shamelessly practised under the Second Empire and revived under the Monarchist ministry of 1877, it is common for public functionaries or employees, from the Prefect of the department down to the local gendarme or road-mender, to do what each can to further the election of the person whom the ministry in power approves. There is much less pressure on individual voters than there was in Louis Napoleon's days, but the district or the commune is made to understand the wishes of the Government and led to expect favours from it in the way of expenditure upon local public works, from a parish pump up to a bridge or a town hall. As Parliamentary majorities are fluctuating, so that every vote in the Chamber becomes of consequence to ministers, the latter exert themselves not only to secure the election of their professed supporters, hut to propitiate as many deputies as possible. The Prefect and under-Prefect and all the persons in local public employment know this, and do their best, whether expressly instructed or not, to promote the candidature of those on whom the ministry counts, or whom it seeks to oblige. In recent years the candidate, if he feels himself strong, has been wont to require these services from the Prefect, whose fortunes he may make or mar by his influence with the Government, and he sometimes lords it over the local officials. In 1902 a deputy whose election was being disputed, on the ground of the governmental influence exerted on his behalf, was reproached with having had himself everywhere presented to the voters by the Prefect. “Quite the reverse,” said he, “it was I who presented him.”

The most active because the most omnipresent and often the most intelligent agent in pushing the interests of a candidate, especially one of advanced opinions, is the village schoolmaster. He is usually also the clerk of the Commune, and has his own reasons for being a strong Republican, because he is the natural rival of the parish priest.

However willing a Prefect may be to turn his administrative machinery to party purposes, he is often embarrassed by the fact that the ministry's hold on office is so weak that the party of the candidate whom he has been opposing may, by some turn of the Parliamentary wheel, come into office and punish him for his action. The worshipper of the Sun must make sure that it is not a setting sun whom he worships. Thus a Prefect may show deficient zeal for ministerial candidates, 1 and could, when the arrondissement was the electoral area, throw out anchors to windward by earning merit with candidates of different political stripes who were standing in different arrondissements of his department. Nevertheless the supporters of the Government actually in power have on the whole the advantage, and thus a threatened ministry usually strives to retain office till the Chamber expires by effluxion of time, so that it, may be able “to make the elections.” Yet it sometimes happens, in the constant shifting of Parliamentary majorities, that the Minister of the Interior finds after a few weeks that he has secured a majority for his successor.

When a return is contested on the ground of irregularity or fraud or undue influence, the matter goes first to a Committee of the Chamber chosen by lot, and then to the full Chamber. The Committees are said sometimes to decide impartially, after weighing the (unsworn) evidence laid before them. The majority in the Chamber is less scrupulous and seats or unseats the members elected in obedience to party motives. 1 It is remarked that at the subsequent fresh election the unseated candidate is usually returned, for the French voter has a touch of the frondeur in him, and sets little store by the decisions of the Chamber, given in the spirit which is known to animate it.

Unsatisfactory as is the condition of things here described, there is little talk of mending it. The Chamber would not part with its control of disputed elections, nor would any one suggest that it should, as in England, be transferred to the judges, for it is held that only a body itself the child of universal suffrage can be entitled to deal with the results universal suffrage purports to have given. As regards official interference, the excuse made under the Second Empire that in a country so changeful as France it was the first duty of every Government to work for the stability of institutions, is one to which Republicans who acclaim the sovereignty of the people are hardly entitled to resort. If the people is all-wise as well as all-powerful, it ought to have its way. The practice is in fact constantly denounced by all parties, but it continues, because no ministry wishes to be the first to part with an advantage which it finds ready to hand in the far-reaching power of the central government. The command of the machinery makes the temptation; and the defence made for yielding to it dates from the earlier days of the Third Republic, when the gravity of the issues then before the Chamber seemed not only to Royalists, who had seen it unscrupulously used by Louis Napoleon, but even in some measure to Republicans also, sufficient to justify practices theoretically indefensible. The system is really of old standing, having its roots in the excessive power over local officials vested in the Government of the day. As an eminent politician observed when inveighing against the evil, “It is not the Government I accuse, but Centralization; not the heir, but the heritage.”

Let it be here mentioned, before proceeding to examine the rules of the Chamber and their working, (a) that a deputy must have attained the age of twenty-five and have all the qualifications of a voting citizen; (b) that members of families that have heretofore reigned in France cannot become candidates; (c) that no one can be a candidate at the same time in more than one constituency; and (d) that salaried officials, except a few of the highest, are ineligible. Ministers of religion are sometimes elected. Bishops have more than once been prominent figures.

The Chamber lasts for four years, meeting automatically in January, and has once only been dissolved before the expiration of its term. It is required by law to sit for at least five months in each year, but in fact has usually held a continuous session, interrupted by short vacations at different times in the year. It is convoked, not by the President of the Republic, though he may summon it for an extraordinary session, but by its own President.

This high functionary resembles the Speaker of the American House of Representatives rather than the Speaker of the British House of Commons, for he is not expected to display that absolute impartiality which is the distinguishing note of the latter, and he may rebuke, sometimes with pungent sarcasm, deputies whose language he disapproves. Custom has allowed him to favour, yet with due regard to fair play, the party to which he belonged before his elevation. He has not in recent years intervened in debates, but he keeps his eye on his own political future, often aspiring to the Presidency of the Republic, and sometimes called from the Chair to become the head of a Ministry. He is assisted in a general direction of the business of the Chamber by a Bureau or Standing Committee, consisting of the four Vice-Presidents (any of whom can preside in his absence), the eight Secretaries, and the three Questeurs, who have charge of financial matters. All these are deputies and chosen by the Chamber.

At its first meeting the Chamber divides itself into eleven sections called Bureaux, the members whereof are chosen by lot and similarly renewed monthly in the same way. Their chief function used to be to create what are called “Commissions,” bodies corresponding generally to the Committees of the British Parliament and the American Congress, but now it is the “Groups “(hereinafter mentioned) who nominate, each in proportion to its numerical strength, deputies to represent them on a Commission. Every Bill introduced is referred to some one of these bodies, which may alter it in any way, after hearing it explained and defended by the introducer. A member of the Commission, called the Reporter, prepares and submits to the Chamber a report upon it as amended, stating the reasons for the form the Commission has given to it. 1 When it comes before the full Chamber he takes charge of it, sometimes almost entirely superseding its introducer, even though a Minister. As the membership of an important Commission is much sought for, the post of Reporter on an important Bill is an avenue to distinction, or a proof of distinction already achieved. Under this system, the Chamber through its Commissions exercises a control over administration as well as legislation, for they can enquire into all the work of a department, summoning its functionaries before them, and recommending or refusing the measures the department desires. The authority of the ministry is reduced, for its bills may return from the Commission in a form different from that which they originally had or which ministers approve. The majority of the Commission need not be supporters of the Ministry, or anywise disposed to meet its wishes.

The inconveniences attending this system of the dual control of ministerial measures are most manifest in the case of the Budget. Financial proposals made by the Executive come before a Commission of thirty-three members, which can alter them at its own pleasure, refusing some appropriations, adding others, so that, unless it condescends to defer to the representations of the Finance Minister, it may produce, after long secret deliberations, a Budget very different from that which he submitted. So when the Ministerial scheme comes before the Chamber, the Reporter appears as a sort of second and rival Finance Minister, whose views may prevail against those of the Cabinet. The Government of the day has little influence, except what it may personally and indirectly exert, upon the composition of the Commissions, which may contain a majority of members opposed to its general financial policy, or to the view it takes of particular measures. The natural result is to render legislation incoherent, to make the conduct of financial policy unstable and confused, and to encourage extravagance, because ministers cannot prevent expenditure they think needless or mischievous. A further consequence is to reduce the authority of an Executive which can be easily overruled, the jealousy which animates the deputies leading them to disregard its wishes, perhaps to enjoy the rebuffs it suffers. The power of those persons who seem responsible because they were the original authors of a measure, or who can be made responsible to the public because they hold an office, being thus so reduced or destroyed that they cannot fairly be treated as responsible, actual control has passed to bodies whose members, debating in secret and holding no office, are not effectively answerable. The nation cannot, if displeased, punish the latter and ought not to punish the former. In these practices there is visible a deviation, due to the tendency of an Assembly to encroach wherever it can, from the doctrine to which lip-service is paid in France, of the separation of legislative from executive power, for an Executive is impotent when the funds needed for administration are withheld.

Here let a curious custom be noted. Only since 1885 have the names of deputies voting in a division been regularly recorded and published. 1 Voting is by ballot-papers of two colours, white denoting assent, blue disapproval. These are collected into an urn passed round by the attendants. A deputy may abstain from voting, though present in the Chamber, and can even vote by proxy, entrusting the function of dropping into the urn his paper to a friend who will vote white or blue according to what he conceives to be the wishes of his colleague. A case was mentioned to me in which an obliging deputy deposited the votes of more than thirty of his colleagues.

So much for what may be called the procedure of the Chamber. Let us pass to the men who run the machinery. As the Chamber is the centre of the whole political system, exerting a more complete control than does any legislature in any other government, we must examine in some little detail the persons who work the system and whom the system forms.

Though social as well as political equality reigns in France, there are still differences of rank, more significant in their disabling than in their recommending effect. Very few deputies come from the ancient nobility or from the large landowners, a section numerous in the West. That financial manufacturing and commercial plutocracy, which is called in America “Big Business,” has few representatives, and among these extremely few persons of great wealth. The largest element consists of professional men, lawyers, physicians, journalists, retired functionaries, and professors or school teachers, this last class being the fewest.

There are not many to speak for agriculture, and even fewer had worked with their hands before they entered the Chamber. Most of the Socialists belong to the professional or commercial class. The Chamber is no more plutocratic than it is aristocratic. It consists chiefly of the same upper strata of the middle classes as does the United States Congress or the Parliament of Canada, the chief difference being that in those bodies there are even more lawyers, but hardly any physicians or teachers or journalists. 1 Few of the barristers have achieved distinction in their profession, for the building up of a large practice would be hardly compatible with attendance in the Chamber, but advocates who have succeeded there sometimes return to the bar and utilize at it their political fame while retaining their seats. Literature is represented almost entirely by journalists. If it be true, as French critics complain, that there are now few such intellectual displays as adorned the Chamber in the days of Louis Philippe, or in the first Assembly, elected in 1871, of the Third Republic, there is plenty of keen intelligence and especially of oratorical talent. It is not so much universal suffrage that has brought in men from -what Gambetta called the nouvelles couches sociales as the diffusion of secondary education, which has made easier the upward path for ability, especially of the literary and rhetorical kind. An English or American observer is impressed by the large number of deputies who possess not merely fluency but the gifts of lucid exposition and readiness in debate. Whether a man has much or little to say, he seems to know how to say it, not indeed in that choice or stately language which delighted auditors in the Assembly of 1871, but with readiness, force and point.

Such being the Deputy, whence comes he and how does he become a deputy? Though a man gains by being a resident or in the electoral area, or connected with it by birth, candidates are not, as in America, restricted to the place of their residence, and men of eminence have sat for districts with which they had no personal tie. The large majority, however, have spent their earlier life in the places they represent, and have begun their political career by acquiring influence among their neighbours. They enter local councils, and thus become known in the canton, the arrondissement, perhaps the department. They serve as Maires of their commune; they are active in local party work, and alert in looking after local interests generally. An ambitious doctor or lawyer may give gratuitous consultations or otherwise ingratiate himself with a local clientele. To belong to a Masonic lodge, or even to an angling society or a gymnastic club,— all these things help. Broadly speaking, the personality of a candidate counts for much, and of course counts for more when political issues are least exciting and where convictions are least strong. One must not only cultivate an easy and genial manner, but observe, at least in the provinces, a decent regularity of life, avoiding, especially in the northern parts of France (for the South is indulgent), whatever could shock the ame rigide de la province. If one has money to spend on local purposes, so much the better, particularly in the mountainous districts where people are poor; but as local candidates are seldom affluent there is less than in England of what is there called “nursing a constituency.” When an aspirant has in these ways established his position, it is for the party committee of his district to put him forward as candidate, since the central party organizations count for little (except among the Socialists) and do not send down a candidate or supply him with the sinews of war. When the election comes, the candidate, except in great cities, will usually talk more about local affairs and the services he expects to render to the constituency than about national politics or the merits and programme of his own particular section of the Eepublican party. The authority of party leaders has been little invoked since the death of Gambetta, the last statesman who had a name to conjure with. Though contests evoke much heat, sometimes expressing itself in personal abuse, perhaps even leading to a duel, the bulk of the citizens may be languid, and many will not sacrifice their Sunday holiday to come to the polls. The vote cast has been light, according to the standards of Britain, Switzerland, or America, rarely however falling below 60 per cent of the qualified voters. 1 In 1919 it stood high, only 30 per cent having failed to vote. 2

Once in, the deputy's first care is to stay in. This must be achieved —and here I refer less to large towns than to the ordinary rural or semi-rural constituencies —by a sedulous attention to the interests not merely of the district but of the individual residents in the district, especially of those to whom he owes his seat. Every kind of service is expected from him. He must obtain decorations for his leading supporters, and find a start in life for their sons and sons-in-law. Minor posts under Government and licenses to sell tobacco have to be secured for the rank and file. All sorts of commissions to be performed in Paris are expected from him, down to the choice of a wet nurse or the purchase of an umbrella. Several hours of his day are consumed in replying to the letters which pour in upon him, besides the time which must be given to the fulfilment of the behests he receives.

This is slavery. But there are compensations. Apart from his salary, which to the average member is a thing to be considered, he has power. He is one of the nine hundred odd who rule France. Though he is the servant of his electors, he is often also their master, respected and deferred to in his district as at least the equal of the Prefect, and perhaps stronger than his local party Committee. He is the fountain of honour, the dispenser of patronage, inspiring a lively sense of favours to come. So long as he helps the Department, and his friends in it, to the satisfaction of their desires, he is not likely to be disturbed, unless some sudden revulsion of political sentiment should sweep over the country. If he is well off, his subscriptions to local purposes help him; if poor, people feel it would be hard to turn him out and send him to seek a new means of livelihood. Accordingly, provided he keeps on good terms with the local wirepullers, and is not involved in a scandal which would reach the constituency, he is likely, at least in rural areas, to hold his seat, and may in the fulness of time transfer himself to the calmer waters and longer term of the Senate. A sitting member is, like a British member, generally selected by his party to fight the seat, so the bulk of members in each Chamber have sat in a preceding one. In 1919, however, 340 new members were elected.

Next to that of staying in, the chief aim of our deputy is to get on. His best course is at first to eschew the grande politique, and be content with establishing his position by securing a place on one or more of the best Commissions, and establishing friendly relations with as many as possible of his colleagues, primarily of course with those who share his opinions, but if possible with other sections also. He usually begins by inscribing himself as member of one of the numerous “groups “into which the Chamber is divided. This brings us to consider the parliamentary parties.

I have already traced in outline the history of the movements of political opinion in France since 1871. It would be tedious, and for our present purpose needless, to describe the successive evolutions and modifications, the splits and recombinations, by which the broad division of politicians into Monarchists and Eepublicans passed into the more numerous now existing parties. It may suffice to enumerate these as respects the Chamber of Deputies, for it is only there (and to a less degree in the Senate), not in the country, that they are clearly marked. The French hahit has long been to describe parties by names which had their origin in days when Conservatives sat on the right hand of the presiding officer, and Liberals on the left; and these names have the advantage of being colourless, while terms bearing a reference to particular tenets or a particular spirit frequently change their meaning, as the title “Progressive “has come to denote persons who are really Moderates, even perhaps Clericals, and “Radical,” once a name of terror, has been so softened down that men talk of “Eadicaux Moderes “or “Eadicaux Con-servateurs.” So the name “Socialist” is so far from being equivalent to “Collectivist “or “Communist “that one has heard of “Socialistes anti-Collectivistes”; and when a party calls itself “Independent,” its independence always inclines to the Eight, or conservative, rather than to the more “advanced “side. 1

The nine groups which existed in 1914 and the eight which existed at the beginning of 1920 might be broadly described as being fractions of four larger parties, or rather subdivisions of four types of political opinion —first, the Monarchists; secondly, the Moderate Republicans (sometimes called Liberals); thirdly, the Advanced Republicans, cherishing the traditions of the First Revolution; and lastly, the Socialists, whose professed aim is an economic reconstruction of society. 1 The groups from time to time dissolve, or unite, or re-form themselves under other names. They may be —indeed they are sure to be—-different in 1925 from what they are in 1920. It is therefore not worth while to describe their vaguely defined tenets or their always varying composition.

Let us now look at the Parliamentary group only as a wheel in the Parliamentary machinery. There is nothing like it in the American Congress, and only occasionally has something like it appeared in the British Parliament. 2 It is nominally a political organization, holding certain views which it desires to advocate. But it is also personal. Having a social side and directly practical aims, it concerns itself with the fortunes of its members. It claims for them places on the more important Commissions, and if a new ministry has to be formed, the incoming Prime Minister will be likely, if the professed opinions of a group do not differ widely from those he professes, to strengthen his position by inviting one or more of its members to accept a portfolio. A new deputy may therefore be guided in joining a group not only by his own political predilections, or by a wish to play up to the general sentiment of his constituents, but also by his estimate of what the group can do for his own career. Some few remain outside the regular groups in the class of “deputies not inscribed,” and they also, it is said, act together on behalf of the personal interests and claims each desires to push. Though the members of a group have a Chairman and a Committee, and though they sometimes meet to consult on their collective action and usually vote together, they have not what the English call “whips “to bring them up to vote on a division. It is only among the Socialists that the obligation to act as one disciplined body is recognized and enforced by the threat of excommunication.

Besides these political groups there are, or have been, others formed on the basis of a specially keen interest in one subject, e.g. the French colonies, lay instruction, national defence; and also other groups devoted to the protection of some material interest. Such is the Agricultural Group, the Sugar Group, the Vine-growing Group, the Group of physicians. These aggregations form a sort of cross division of the Chamber. Most of them have nothing to do with party politics, and exert pressure on the ministry only for the advancement of their special industrial or commercial aims. The Colonial Group has large ambitions, and is frequently active in influencing governmental policy in the Chamber as well as in prompting the press.

As the groups are numerous, and no one of them commands one-third of the Chamber, no ministry expects to possess a majority which it can call its own. It must rely on a combination of two or more groups, constituting what is called, when it has reached solid stability, a Block. While the Block holds together, Ministers are reasonably safe. But the fluidity of each group imports an uncertainty into the action of every combination, so that when a new issue suddenly arises, due perhaps to displeasure at some act of the ministry, or to any other cause which creates temporary passion, the majority may crumble and the ministry fall, even without the open dissolution of the combination. It has also sometimes happened that the extreme groups, such as the Clericals on the one side and the Socialists on the other, hostile in principle, suddenly coalesce, and turn the balance of votes on a division. The union of extremists against the men in the middle is specially dangerous, because seldom predictable. These causes, taken together, explain the kaleidoscopic changes of government.

Another feature of the system, surprising to a British or American observer, is the absence of recognized leadership. Though every Group has its president, who to some extent directs it, who negotiates on its behalf with the existing ministry and with other groups, and is presumptively the person who will be chosen to represent it in a new ministry, he exerts less authority than Parliamentary leaders do in Britain or Canada or Australasia. This seems due not altogether to the absence of political issues sharply defined as between the various Republican groups, but partly to an exaggeration of the sentiment of equality combined with the French tendency to the assertion of individual will. So soon as any one statesman shoots ahead of others by his oratorical gifts or forceful personality, he excites first jealousy and then envy. His colleagues render to him no more allegiance than their own interests or those of the Group prescribe. His enemies talk of him as aiming at a sort of dictatorship, and the charge gives secret pleasure to some of his adherents. Thus Gam-betta fell at the moment when he seemed strongest. Seldom has a Parliamentary chief so strong a hold on the country outside as to find in its support a means for securing the loyalty of his following in the Chamber. At general elections, the names of the chief statesmen are no talismans: they may, indeed, be scarcely mentioned. No one since Gambetta, except perhaps Waldeck Eousseau at the election of 1902, has been a popular figure, a name wherewith to conjure, in the same sense as were Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli, in Britain, or as Macdonald and Laurier were in Canada, or as Parkes in New South Wales, or Seddon in New Zealand. 1 This fact has something to do with the atmosphere of personal intrigue which has long suffused the French Chamber. If parties were tightly organized, they might find an advantage in having a recognized leader and making much of him. But only the Socialists are so organized, and they are the last who would seek to exalt one man above his fellows.

This passion for equality, this dislike of authority, this incessant striving for prominence and influence among the deputies, each descrying a ministerial portfolio at the end of the vista, finds another expression in the constant struggle on the part of the Chamber (and its Committees) to assert itself against the ministry and grasp more and more of executive power. The Commissions are already even stronger than the Committees of the Senate and the House in America, and their leading members are wont to express surprise that there is not a similar effort in the British House of Commons to overbear the ministry.

The every-day work which the Chamber performs may be classified as (a) legislation, (b) criticism of executive departments, (c) displacement of ministries. In legislation the contrast between measures introduced and measures passed is startling. A deputy finds their introduction an easy means of attracting notice, and can thus please his constituents, whom he deluges with copies. A first and second reading are readily granted on the plea of urgency, but the great majority go no further, being stifled or shelved in the Commissions. Proposals on subjects of importance brought in by a minister have a better chance, but may emerge from a Commission so changed as to be scarcely recognizable. Comparatively few are passed into law. Questions of the first magnitude, debated session after session, remain long unsettled. This happens in all legislatures, but perhaps most frequently in France, not merely because the Commission system and the group system hamper the power of a ministry, but for a deeper reason also, viz. the existence of the Civil Code, which has permanently fixed so many principles of private civil law as to induce a dislike of innovations, for in the French mind, which superficial observers have called volatile, there is a strong vein of conservatism. E'ew questions, economic and social, have emerged, especially during the last half-century, which the Code does not cover, but the Chamber does not find in legislation its chief interest, as is realized by those who notice how scanty is the attendance when important Bills are under discussion. Its delight is in personal matters and those “live issues” which affect the fortunes of a government. Any mistake made by a Minister, any conduct which can be represented as having either a pro-clerical or an anti-clerical tendency, any act which either offends the Labour Unions or betrays subservience to them, leads to animated debates which may shake the ministry if it be weak, or accentuate hostility if it is defiant. Such acts furnish pretexts for resorting to that favourite method of attacking a Cabinet which is called the Interpellation. The deputy gives notice that he will interrogate a minister on some declaration made or administrative act done by him. The interpellation consists of a speech denouncing the conduet or the policy blamed, and asking the Prime Minister, or the Minister personally responsible, for an explanation. Neither the Cabinet nor the particular Minister is obliged to accept the debate on the spot, so usually a later day is fixed for the interpellation. When that day has arrived and the debate has run its course, a motion is made for passing to the Order of the day (i.e. proceeding to the next business on the paper). Then arises the opportunity for defeating the Cabinet. The Ordre du jour can be either pur et simple or motive. The Ordre pur et simple is a motion stating, without any word of praise or blame for the Administration, that, the debate being at an end, the House resumes its previously appointed work. The Ordre du jour motive adds to this resolution some words approving or condemning the conduct of the Ministry, the favourable resolutions coming from the friends, the unfavourable from the enemies of the Cabinet. The skill of the Opposition is shown in so phrasing their motions as to rope in the largest number possible of groups hostile to the ministry, while introducing something against which a group likely to befriend the ministry will find it hard to vote. Before the division the Ministry declare which of these ordres du jour they are disposed to accept. If they carry it, they are back into smooth water. If defeated, their bark goes down. These interpellations are the field-days of politics, rousing the greatest excitement, and drawing crowds of spectators. If the Cabinet has lost moral authority, or if it becomes known that it is riven by internal dissensions, almost any pretext will serve. Such a pretext is seldom found in matters of foreign policy, for an honourable tradition disposes men to avoid anything that could weaken France in the face of the outer world. Ministries fall more frequently by these interpellations than in divisions on legislative or financial measures, and they may fall quite suddenly, perhaps by an unexpected combination of groups, perhaps by want of promptitude in accepting, or themselves devising, the ordre du jour motive which will carry them safely down the rapids.

The public business of the Chamber is not, however, the chief care of the deputy. He has private work to do which affects not only his own personal fortunes but the exercise of the functions discharged in public sittings. The relations (already described) which he maintains with his constituents oblige him to be in constant contact with the administrative departments. Only from the latter can he obtain the favours which he owes to the former. Ministers dispense the honours, the medals and ribands, the administrative posts, mostly of small consequence, the tobacco licences, and even the college bursaries. To them the deputy goes when the commune or the arrondissement desires a bridge or a road, when a farmer wants to be compensated for damage done to his vines by a hail-storm, when a taxpayer disputes the tax-gatherer's claim, when a parent wishes to have an indulgent view taken of his son's performances in an examination, when a litigant thinks that a word of recommendation might help him in a court of justice. 1 The constituent writes to the deputy and the deputy approaches the minister, and when either a grant of money to the commune, or a riband, or a salaried post is in question, the minister is made to understand that the deputy's support at the next critical division will be affected by the more or less benevolent spirit the Administration displays. Thus besides the great game of politics played by the parties in the Chamber, besides the pressure of the Commissions upon the Administration, there is a continuous process of triangular trafficking between the constituents, the deputy, and the ministers, which is, to the two latter, always vexatious and often humiliating. A somewhat similar process went on once in England, and is not extinct, though now much attenuated, in the United States. Its prevalence in France, where the grosser forms of corruption are comparatively slight, is due to the concentration in the National Government of the whole administrative machinery of the country, every local functionary being appointed from Paris, and the cost of most kinds of local, public work being defrayed by the national treasury. 2 A French Administration might well desire to have less far extended power, for its power is its weakness.

The Chamber is full of talent because, though many of the members have come from narrow surroundings and retain narrow views, the quickness and flexibility of the French mind enable them to adjust themselves to the conditions of a large assembly more readily than would most Englishmen or Americans. When an exciting moment arrives, the debates reach a high level of excellence. Repartees are swift and bright, and great tactical skill is displayed in escaping dangers or forming combinations on the spur of the moment. Turbulent scenes occur, but none worse than have once or twice occurred both in Congress and in the House of Commons, nor has violence approached the pitched battles of Buda Pest, where benches were broken, and inkstands hurtled through the air. There is little personal rancour, even among those who are most bitterly opposed in politics. Deputies will abuse one another in the Chamber and forthwith fraternize in the corridors, profuse in compliments on one another's eloquence. The atmosphere is one of a friendly camaraderie, which condemns acridity or vindictiveness. Parisians say that the level of manners has declined since 1877, and the style of speaking altered, with a loss of the old dignity. Wit may be as abundant, but one misses that philosophic thought by which the Assemblies of 1848 and 1871 impressed the nation and won the admiration of Europe.

The deputy receives a salary of 15,000 francs (£600 = £2800) a year. The sum used to be 9000 francs, but in 190G the deputies voted themselves an increase up to the present figure, rather to the displeasure of the country. Are they then fairly described as professional politicians? The mere fact of payment does not make them so, any more than it does the members of the British and Australian Parliaments. Comparatively few have entered the Chamber merely to make a living, though there are many whose effort to remain there is more active because they have abandoned their former means of livelihood. It would have been practically impossible not to pay those who quit their avocations to give their whole time to politics. Payment may not have done much to lower the moral standard of political life: it may indeed have enabled some to resist the temptations which surround them, yet it necessarily tends to make them eager to keep their seats, and in so far affects their independence. 1 They are not, as a rule, closely held to the terms of their electoral professions of faith, though proposals have been submitted to the Chamber that the popular mandate of any one who has disregarded these professions should be deemed, and if necessary judicially pronounced, to have been forfeited. It is customary for a deputy to appear before his constituents at least once a year, as in England, and to give a review of the political situation, which furnishes an opportunity for questioning him on his conduct. It is not, however, by his action in the grande politique of the Chamber that a deputy (other than a Socialist) usually stands or falls. Those few who are supposed to represent great financial or commercial interests need not greatly fear the attacks of extreme partisans in their districts, for they are likely to have the means provided them of securing by various influences the fidelity of the bulk of their constituents.

The chief differences between the professional politician of France and him of America is that the latter depends even more on his party organization than on what he secures for his constituents, that he can seldom count on a long tenure of his seat or of an administrative post, and that he can more easily find a business berth if he is sent back to private life. The number of those who belong to the class described in America as “professionals “is of course far larger there than in France, for it includes a host of persons who are not members of legislatures, most of the work they do being of a humbler kind.

CHAPTER XXI: cabinet ministers and local party organizations

Three powers rule France: the Deputies, the Ministers, and the local Party Committees. We may now pass to the second of these three forces that are incessantly contending or bargaining.

The Cabinet ministers are in practice, though not by law, either deputies or senators, and all expect, when their brief span of office has ended, to return to their functions as private members and resume the rôle of critics till the time comes for them to succeed their successors. Herein France resembles the British self-governing Dominions, in which every minister sits in Parliament. 1 and is unlike the United States, where a minister not only cannot sit in Congress but has, more frequently than not, never sat there. Thus the minister is by temperament, ideas, and habits first and always a member of the legislature. He knows his Chamber's ways, and has an intimacy, in which there may be little enough of friendship, with most of its members.

The person who has been summoned to form a Cabinet as President of the Council, selects his colleagues, choosing most of them from his own particular group, but generally adding one or two or more from other Republican groups by which he expects to be supported. The differences in their views and affiliations do not prevent the persons thus selected from getting on together and presenting a united front to the opposing faction. Self-interest prescribes this, and the political cleavages between the Republican groups are not very deep. Consistency is one of the lesser virtues in politics. A recent French Prime Minister observed, “Les necessités font éclater les dogmes.”

The qualities which bring a deputy into the class of “ Ministrables” 1 do not much differ from those which lead to Cabinet office in every democratic country and popular assembly. In France they may be summed up as —Ready eloquence, alertness of mind, Parliamentary tact, personal popularity, general adaptability. In the allotment of posts knowledge counts for something, and most so in the departments of finance and of the naval and military services. But adaptability counts for more. 2 Dignity of character and a spotless reputation are a valuable asset, especially in a Prime Minister, yet their absence does not prevent a man from rising high.

The Cabinet offices vary in number —in 1913 there were twelve —all of the same rank and carrying the same salary, but there may be (and in war time were) ministers without a portfolio, so the deliberative Cabinet might be of any size, though it had never, up to 1914, exceeded seventeen.

French ministers cannot well be compared with those of the United States, for the latter do not sit in the legislature, and are often selected less for their capacity than because they belong to States which the President wishes to gratify by giving them representation in his Cabinet. An American minister usually disappears from Washington after his four years' term of office, and may be no more heard of in the world of politics, while in France the ex-Minister holds on; and the wealth of the nation in former occupants of high office grows so fast by frequent Cabinet changes that there are plenty of tried men from whom a Prime Minister may make his selections. Talent is never lacking, though it is more frequently of the showy than of the solid order.

The dignity of a Minister is, next to the Presidency of the Republic and the Presidencies of one or other Chamber, the goal of a politician's ambitions. It carries the title of Excellency, and its possessor is received with every mark of honour when he visits a provincial city to perform some public function. The power which belongs to it is more extensive than a like office enjoys in any other free country, for nowhere else are the functions of the Executive so far-reaching. But this power is greater in semblance than in reality. The machinery of French administration is so complicated that the permanent official hierarchy, deferential as they are to their chief, can impede his action when they think that he is breaking through their settled practice, for want of expert knowledge may make him helpless in their hands, not to add that he is generally deposed, or transferred to some other post, before he has had time to learn to “know the ropes.” If he tries to understand everything he is asked to sign, work accumulates, and the machine stops. While he is struggling to master his duties, he has not only to face his critics in the Chamber but to endure the daily plague of requests from deputies to do this or that job for the benefit of their constituents. High-minded and courageous as he may be, he is obliged to think of the fortunes of the ministry, and must yield to many an unwelcome demand in order to secure the vote of the deputy who himself seeks to secure the vote of his constituent. Nor are the deputies the only people to be feared. The financiers and heads of big business enterprises, partly by the power of their wealth, partly through the newspapers or the deputies, whom they can use as tools, may bring to bear a formidable pressure.

Two other complaints are heard in France. One is that the minister brings with him, or is soon surrounded by, a swarm of personal dependents, private secretaries, and various hangers-on. These constitute what may be called his private political and patronage staff, who help in his parliamentary work, deal with the press, keep an eye on places to be disposed of, and are what physicians call a nidus for intrigue as well as an annoyance to the permanent officials of the department. The other charge is that the tendency of local officials to refer everything to Paris continues to grow, delaying business and increasing the risks of jobbery, because the Minister, who cannot know the facts as well as the Prefect on the spot, is at the mercy of interested representations.

The “expectation of life,” as insurance agents say, of a French Ministry is short. Between 1875 and 1914 there were 48 administrations with an average duration of nine months and twenty-two days. Only one ministry since 1896, that of M. “Waldeck Rousseau, had lasted for more than two years. A change of Ministry makes little difference to the country, and cannot —as it often can in England —be deemed to indicate any change of popular opinion. When a Ministry falls it does not lose a public confidence which it may never have possessed. This is a phenomenon which Frenchmen deplore as harmful to the nation, because it prevents ministers from acquiring a grasp of their departmental duties, delays legislative progress, and creates a general sense of instability, defects which have done much to discredit Parliamentarism in the eyes of the people. Yet they are less serious evils than they would be in other countries, and that for two reasons. They do not disorganize, though they disturb, the general course of administration, because the great machine goes steadily on its way, being worked by a strong and competent bureaucracy which is as little affected by changes at the top as the equally strong and competent bureaucracy of the Roman Empire was disturbed in the provinces by the frequent accession to supreme power of one military adventurer after another. They affect but slightly the foreign policy of France, for its general lines have been prescribed by the necessity of maintaining unity in the face of a threatening enemy. They are an evil less serious than the inner malady of which they are the visible symptom. What then are the causes which make ministries so unstable and changes so frequent? Those which appear on the surface have been already stated, viz. the number of groups in the Chamber, the want of discipline in these groups and shifting of deputies from one to another, the suddenness with which political crises arise, the tendency of extreme groups to unite for the momentary aim of defeating a ministry which they dislike for opposite reasons, the impatience which makes deputies desire a change for the sake of a change. But behind these there are other causes of wider scope, due to permanent conditions. Some of these may be enumerated.

(1) Regional divisions of opinion in the country, making the political tendencies of the West, of the North and East, of the South, and (still more markedly) of the South-east differ so much from one another as to prevent a general consensus of view on fundamental questions.

(2) The antagonism between the strongly Roman Catholic proclivities of certain sections of the population and the anti-religious, or at least anti-clerical, vehemence of other sections.

(3) The hostility of the industrial masses, especially in the manufacturing and mining areas, to the employers and to the richer sort of people generally. But for the outside pleasure, enforcing national cohesion, a class war might have broken out in many places, as indeed it has done at intervals in Paris, and to a less extent in other industrial centres.

(4) The indifference to politics of a large part of the agricultural population. This has its good side in so far as it has prevented party passion from seizing on the bulk of the nation and making the struggles of the Chamber provoke outbursts of violence over the country. But it has been also unfortunate in having failed to keep the deputies in order, to condemn intrigues, to discourage the creation of small groups, to make the parties feel their responsibility to the nation. If Parliamentary parties were formed on well-defined and permanent lines, the policy approved by a majority at a general election might be steadily pursued (as in England or Holland or Canada) until the country changes its mind, or some conspicuous error brings about the collapse of a ministry.

(5) To these causes one may perhaps add the fact that since the death of Gambetta no single leader of dominating personality has arisen. Democracies need men who by their genius, or by the strength and worth of their characters, can become not merely leaders but inspirers of a party. 1 The foremost men of the last forty years have been parliamentary rather than popular chiefs. Some of them (I speak of course only of those who have passed from the scene) have shown brilliant talent and great force. But none have had that sort of hold on the country which enabled Pitt or Peel or Gladstone in England, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and Lincoln (not to mention later statesmen) in America, to become national figures, who were as necessary to their parties as their parties were to them. To the causes which prevent the development of leadership in France we must presently return.

After the deputies and the ministers comes the third and largest set of the actual though unconspicuous rulers of France, those who all over the country keep the machine of party government running, managing the elections by which deputies are chosen and ministers are installed in power. To understand the part played by the local committees we must recur to the political parties as already enumerated.

These parties, though more or less organized in the Chamber of Deputies, do not extend over the country at large, or, to speak more exactly, they exist in the country as tendencies or nuances of opinion rather than as political organisms. For the purposes of France as a whole one must think of those four parties, or rather four schools of opinion already noted —the Right or Clerical Monarchist, the Centre or Moderate Republicans, the Radicals or Advanced Republicans, and the Socialists. Of these four only one, the Socialists, constitute a cohesive party in the English or American sense, for they alone have created and maintain a well-knit organization extending over a large part of the country and gripping its members tightly together outside as well as inside the Chamber. Of the other three, the Clericals or Monarchists hold well together, but the number of those among them who profess Legitimist principles has been much reduced, and their organization is confined to certain areas. The other two, Moderate and Advanced Republicans, are divided into the sections already described. Some of these sections have a central party committee as well as a certain number of local committees which carry on a propaganda, publish literature, and look after elections. No party group or section has, however, an organization ramified through all the constituencies like the three parties (Tory, Liberal, and Labour) which divide Great Britain or the still better drilled and more constantly active two great historic parties of the United States. There would be no use in trying to work a Socialist organization in the agricultural parts of Brittany, nor a Monarchist party in Marseilles. Accordingly no section dreams of running in every electoral district candidates of its own particular colour, but confines itself to those in which it has a reasonable chance of success.

If you ask an average French citizen about his political views, he is as likely as not to say that he takes nothing to do with politics; “Monsieur, je ne m'oceupe pas de la politique.” If, however, he has views and is willing to express them, he will probably prove to be, in the rural parts or small towns of the west and north, either a Conservative of Clerical leanings or a Moderate anti-Clerical Republican; in the south-east, the central, and the eastern regions or small towns, either an Advanced or a Moderate Republican; in the mining districts and the great industrial centres, either an Advanced Republican or a Socialist. There are of course nearly everywhere some men of Socialist views, and everywhere some few Clericals or Monarchists, usually of a Legitimist colour. Candidates, therefore, whatever group in the Chamber they mean to join, belong to one or other of these four types of opinion, and do not —always excepting the Socialists —usually announce themselves to a constituency as adherents of any one Republican group in particular. It is between the four types that the electoral battle rages. The candidate may be sent down, or be financially aided, by the central committee of a group, but he does not necessarily appear as their man, nor (unless he be a Socialist) as selected by a local committee of a particular stripe. He stands on his own account, just as candidates did in Britain in the middle of last century, before parties had begun to be locally organized. When he issues his address, it is accompanied by a list of his chief local supporters, who constitute a sort of general committee, but it is only a few of the more active among them who form, along with the candidate and his agents, the working committee. Other candidates may come forward belonging to the same or a nearly allied section of the Republican party, each recommending himself less by the particular character of his views than by his personal merits and by the fervour of his promises to serve the material interests of the constituency. Candidatures are numerous because not generally costly. There used to be three, four, or five (or possibly more) aspirants to the single seat, perhaps a Monarchist and a Socialist, and three Republicans of slightly different shades, but now under the new system of election by departments with proportional representation, the number is larger. All went to the poll; and when, as frequently happened, none secured an absolute majority, it was usual for the one among the Republicans who had received the fewest votes to retire, so that the Republican party might have the best chance against a Monarchist or a Socialist. There is, however, no established practice in these matters, and an Advanced Radical may feel himself nearer to a Socialist than to a Republican of a less vivid hue, while some moderate Republicans differ but slightly from Conservatives.

Acute French observers distinguish two types of election. In one there is a more or less avowed coalition on the platform of anti-clericalism by the various groups of the Centre and the Left against the groups of the Right. The other type shows a sort of combination or co-operation of the Centre, or Moderate Republicans, with the Right on the platform of anti-Socialism and “social order “against the Socialists and more advanced Radicals. The election of 1906 belonged to the former type, the election of 1919 to the latter. In it the Socialist party suffered a set-back, owing to the uneasiness created by the language and policy of their most extreme men. In France, even more than elsewhere, extremists produce by their activity and vehemence the impression that they speak for the whole party, and thereby damage its cause.

In most constituencies, or at any rate in those dominated by the Advanced Republicans, political committees are kept alive during the interval between one election and another in order to look after the interests both of the party and of the candidate, and work if necessary in local elections, whenever these are fought on political lines, as well as in Senatorial elections for the Department. Such committees are not, as in America, Great Britain, and Australia, elected by the local members of the party, and though often in touch with the Central Committee in Paris of the group with which they are in sympathy, they do not take their orders from it. It may excite surprise that in a country where democratic principles are so ardently professed and where the disposition to work out every principle with consistent logic is so strong, the local committee which conducts the business of the party should not be officially created, and from time to time 1 renewed, as is done in the United States, by a vote of all the local members of the party. The reason is that the bulk of the citizens are less definitely committed to any one party than they are in the English-speaking countries, and that the groupings in the Chamber are not generally represented by like groupings over the country at large. The local committees are rather what used to be called in Scotland “cliques”? — small camarillas of persons whose political activity is due either to the fervour of their attachment to a certain set of doctrines or to a desire to secure local influence and obtain the best of what is going in the way of honours and benefits for themselves and their kinsfolk or friends. Such good things are obtainable (as already observed) from the Administration through the deputy, who is the Fountain of Honour. The clique goes to him. He presses the ministry, or tries to overawe the Prefect. Sometimes there is in the clique a strong man who fills the place of the American Boss, but more frequently the deputy is himself a sort of Boss, being in constant and confidential relations with the chiefs of the committee and dependent upon their support, just as they are dependent on him, for without him they could not get those favours the dispensation whereof is the basis of their local power. The men who compose these local cliques —minor officials or ex-officials, shopkeepers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists —constitute, along with the deputies and a few rich men, financiers, chiefs of industry and owners of great newspapers, what are called the classes dirigeantes of France, the practical rulers of the country, though of course more or less controlled by that public opinion which they bear a large part in making.