A SINGLE DEMAGOGIC HOUSE.
[TO TRIG EDITOR OP Till " SPECTATOR."1
SIE,—Political events in England tell on us in Canada, and we happen at this moment to be debating the question of the Second House of Parliament. Now comes to us the report of the division in your House of Commons on the Unemployed Workmen Bill, an unmistakable scheme of Socialistic con- fiscation, for which, it seems, a hundred and sixteen Members voted, while, what is still more ominous, two hundred and eighty-eight absconded. Now do away with the Second Chamber, and give over the country and the Empire to a single demagogic House, soon, perhaps, to be made still more demagogic by the addition of female suffrage. Two things this scene portends. One is the final break-up of party, the condition of which bad already become grotesque, when to make a party Moderatism and Socialism were clamped together, and side by side with British patriotism sat Irish enmity to the British Empire. The other thing foreshadowed is the collapse of demagogic government. I say "demagogic," not "democratic." You fancy that Great Britain is a Monarchy and that the United States are a Republic. The United States have a Monarch, and a powerful one, though elective, in their President, and a force mainly conservative in their Senate. Your Monarchy, whatever it may be socially, . is politically an historic form. Your House of Lords is morally weak, excluded from action on money Bills, and now threatened with abolition. You are drifting towards absolute government by a single demagogic House, of the character and probable action of which a pretty clear judgment can now be formed.—
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