In a man of very strong intellectual force like Mr.
'Courtney, no doubt sturdy independence is a very valuable quality, but we think he greatly underrates the difficulty which this quality would introduce into the working of repre- sentative Governments when he praises it as if it were the natural ideal of Parliamentary representatives. Just imagine what a Parliament consisting of six hundred and seventy Mr. Leonard Courtneys would be like,—we do not think that any steady Government would be conceivable at all with such a representative body behind it. There would be as many colli- sions between its various Parliamentary atoms as astronomers tell us that there are between the constituent elements of the :Saturnian rings, in which countless impacts and rebounds -occur every minute of every day, so that the apparent con- tinuity and solidity of the rings is really an illusion only due to our great distance from the planet and the inadequacy of our telescopes. Parliaments without solid masses of fol- lowers on both sides who hardly think, except on the rarest .occasions, of not following their leaders, would be institutions adapted to sustain anarchy, and not to support government. None the less, in the case of exceptional men like Mr. Courtney, independence is a valuable quality, and prevents the crystallisation of parties into mere impenetrable masses of political habit.
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