IS OUR GOVERNMENT DEMOCRATIC P
[To TEE EDITOR 07 THE "SPECTATOR."' SIR,—Is our Government democratic or despotic ? The answer is supplied by three of their recent financial measures. Old-Age Pensions, Payment of Members, and National Insur- ance. The Government saddled the people with these heavy burdens without consulting them. None of them were sub- mitted to the people at the last General Election. That is despotism. Old-Age Pensions were to cost about six millions a year, and be for the poor above seventy. In practice they already cost more than double that amount, and the reduction of the age to sixty-five or sixty seems to be in the near future. Crude National Insurance has been forced upon the people, carried by a despotic Government, and we are just at the beginning of the endless trouble it will create. Despotic as these measures have been, the worst is to come, for the men whom the people have sent into Parliament have voted themselves a salary without consulting their masters. They modestly begin with £400 a year, but it will not end there, as our Colonial Governments show. Nor is the money part the worst, for every member dependent on his salary will first ask himself on every measure which comes before him: " How will this affect my salary P If the Government be turned out I may not be returned, and my income will be gone; therefore I must avoid the risk by supporting them, right or wrong, and thus support myself." This is human nature, and may supply some future Gibbon with a powerful reason for the decline and fall of the British Empire.—I am
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