Is not Sir Charles Dilke a little premature in all
this? The new Liberal Cabinet is not yet formed, and every detail may be modified except the elective principle. We doubt if moderate Liberals will decentralise to such an extent ; andare quite certain that they will fight the open Vestry," with its immense powers. Englishmen will not grant all that authority over property to a mass meeting, which would be attended only by those who wanted to job or to resist jobbing. They want a representative Council in the parish, made up of the best men, not a meeting of householders who would seldom be orderly and never respon- sible, and who, when local feeling was strongly moved, would go to fisticuffs. We might as well constitute a succession of Hyde-Park meetings the Common Council of London. There will be resistance on this point, and also on the point of the limita- tion of powers. A mass meeting with the rights of a Court of Chancery to enforce restitutions is a positively grotesque *mg- gestion ; it is Democracy gone mad, and looking not to the House of Commons for a model, but to the Roman Comitia.
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