MR. HAROLD COX'S REJECTION.
[To TEE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR."] Srn,—Your article of last week will have deepened the impression created by the speeches of Lord Rosebery, Mr. Harold Cox, and Lords Cromer and Hugh Cecil. Yet
when the present degradation of politics has been traced to its cause in "the machine," the questions still remain:
What is the causa causans ? How comes it that so few men aspiring to the high tasks of legislating for and
guiding this great Empire are willing to resist the " pooling " of their consciences ? And wherefore is so much of the electorate willing to yield to the caucus and submit to the thraldom of so faulty and vicious a representation P The reflection is somewhat sad ; but it would seem that the answer to these questions was foreshadowed seventy years ago in a conversation between Sidonia and Coningsby (Book IV., chap. 13) :—
" • You take then a dark view of our position ?'—' Troubled not dark. I do not ascribe to political institutions that paramount influence which it is the feeling of this age to attribute to them.' Where then would you look for hope ? In what is more powerful than laws and institutions and without which the best laws and the most skilful institutions may be a dead letter or the very means of tyranny—in the national character. It is not in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see the peril of England ; it is in the decline of its character as a community.'"
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