THE BOROUGH COUNCIL ELECTIONS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTA1OR:1
SIR,—The defeat of the Progressives in the borough elections may be accepted as an indication that the credulity of the
electorate is at last on the wane, and that a reaction of feeling, not only against municipal extravagance, but against the entire Socialistic policy of the Government, is about to take place. This moment seems, therefore, propitious for calling attention to the following extract from Bagehot's "English Constitution" (Introduction to the Second Edition), written in 1872. The words are as true to-day as they were over thirty years ago :—
"Our statesmen have the greatest opportunities they have had for many years and likewise the greatest duty. They have to guide the new voters in the exercise of the franchise, to guide them quietly and without saying what they are doing, but still to guide them. The leading statesmen in a free country have great momentary power. They settle the conversation of mankind. It is they who by a great speech or two determine what shall be said and what shall be written for long after. They, in conjunction with their counsellors, settle the programme of their party—the platform,' as the Americans call it, on which they and those associated with them are to take their stand for the political campaign. It is by that programme, by a comparison of the programmes of different statesmen, that the world forms its judgments. The common ordinary mind is quite unfit to fix for itself what political question it shall attend to ; it is as much as it can do to judge decently of the questions which drift down to it, and are brought before it; it almost never settles its topics; it can only decide upon the issue of those topics. And in settling what these questions shall be, states- men have now especially a great responsibility. If they raise questions which will excite the lower orders of man- kind ; if they raise questions on which the interest of those orders is not identical with, or is antagonistic to, the whole interests of the State, they will have done the greatest harm they can do. The future of this country depends on the happy working of a delicate experiment, and they will have done all they could to vitiate that experiment. Just when it is desirable that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good issues, and only good issues, put before them, these statesmen will have suggested bad issues. They will have suggested topics which will bind the poor as a class together; topics which will excite them against the rich ; topics the discussion of which in the only form in which that discussion reaches their ear will be to make them think that some new law can make them comfort- able—that it is the present law which makes them uncom- fortable—that Government has at its disposal an inexhaustible fund out of which it can give to those who now want without also creating elsewhere other and greater wants. If the first work of the poor voters is to try to create a poor man's paradise,' as poor men are apt to fancy that Paradise, and as they are apt to think they can create it, the great political trial now beginning will simply fail. The wide gift of the elective franchise will be a great calamity to the whole nation, and to those who gain it as great a calamity as to any."
If, as seems to be indicated by recent events and by popular opinion, the electorate is already beginning to "form its judgment" on the programme of the present Government, the "great calamity may yet be averted..—I am, Sir, &e.,
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