MAINE ON SINGLE-CHAMBER GOVERNMENT.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I think many of your readers will be interested in the enclosed quotation from Sir Henry Maine's "Popular Govern. ment " (ed. 1885, pp. 125, 126) which has been sent me by a friend as a remarkable instance of political foresight.
"There does not seem to be any insuperable objection, first of all, to making a distinction between ordinary legislation and legislation which in any other country would be called constitu- tional; and, next, to requiring for the last a special legislative procedure intended to secure caution and deliberation, and as near an approach to impartiality as a system of party government will admit of. The alternative is to leave unsettled all the questions h 311 the controversy of 1884 brought to light, and to give froe play to a number of tendencies already actively at work. It is quite plain whither they are conducting us. We are drifting towards a type of government associated with terrible events—a single assembly, armed with full powers over the Constitution, which it may exercise at pleasure. It will be a theoretically all- powerful Convention, governed by a practically all-powerful secret * Committee of Public Safety, but kept from complete sub- mission to its authority by obstruction, for which its rulers are always seeking to find a remedy in some kind of moral guillotine."
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