discovering what is the opinion of the nation on the question at issue. Radical orators will no doubt lash themselves into fury over this invasion of the Crown's prerogative.' The wiser course is to examine the practice of other countries, remembering at the same time that deadlocks are of the rarest occurrence in our parliamentary history.

Some countries, e.g. Australia, South Africa and France, provide that in certain cases the two Houses shall sit as one, and a majority of the whole shall decide. This device might be employed in conjunction with a brand-new elective Upper House. It is more doubtful whether its use to settle the differences between the House of Commons and an hereditary and nominated Upper House would be generally acceptable. We have moreover little experience to guide us as to the merits of the scheme. Everything depends upon the conditions under which it is put into force. Is our pattern to be Australia, where no joint sitting can be held until after a General Election has endorsed the judgment of the Lower House? Or South Africa, where the joint sitting is held in the second session after the disagreement becomes manifest, without any recourse to a General Election, and in the case of a Finance Bill even in the same session? Or France, where it is restricted to the settlement of questions relating to the fundamental Constitution? The particular circumstances of each of these countries have led them to adopt different methods. In Australia the Senate was given great power as the guardian of State rights; in South Africa it was felt that the true safeguard against unnecessary change was the intense conservatism of the mass of the population; in France problems of a kind happily unknown to us dictated the form of the constitution. And even if the plan were adopted in a form believed to protect the rights of both Houses, would it be any advance on the present custom of the Constitution, by which the Upper House yields after the people have decided against it at a General Election?

Most other countries leave the two Houses to find their own way out of a deadlock, and there is much to be said for this course. Some middle way will be found much sooner, if compromise is necessary, than when one House can ignore the other. In all questions of minor

importance the two Houses may well be left to harmonise their differences, while in matters of great moment a deadlock will only last so long as the country has not expressed a decided will one way or the other. Unfortunately the difficulty is growing greater of discerning what the voice of the country means as it gives out its uncertain sound from the confused babel of a General Election. Thus once more we are led to conclude that the core of the problems discussed in these pages is to be found in ascertaining what the will of the people really is. That will we all of us must nowadays accept as the supreme arbiter of our fate, if we can only discover what it is. But few of us are ready to accept blindly the will of a temporary party majority in Parliament on questions of fundamental importance.

The creed of political philosophers of the school of Lord Morley has ever been that the representatives must govern for the people, and that the part played by the people must remain an indirect one. But some of us are beginning to doubt whether a creed applicable enough to the nineteenth century is not becoming outworn in the twentieth. 'The fatal and insuperable defect,' as a Liberal writer has said, of the Parliament Bill is that in over-riding the House of Lords it in effect abolishes the British people,' and while we are not yet so 'democratic' as to insist that our Parliament should not meet oftener than once in two years, most of us would rather abolish Parliament than the people. In all ordinary seasons the check of a Second Chamber may be sufficient. But in a critical struggle between the two Houses themselves the bicameral system may require to be reinforced by an appeal to the nation more direct in its character than that of a General Election. Much may be said against the Referendum, but little that is not equally directed against democracy. It would entail great changes in our parliamentary system, and Cabinets might have to accustom themselves to accepting a rebuff at the hands of the nation without necessarily resigning. But clumsy contrivance though it is, it would have the supreme merit of settling beyond question the matter in dispute-a consummation not likely to be secured without prolonged friction by any other means.

Art. 11.-JOHN STUART MILL.

1. The Letters of John Stuart Mill. Edited, with an Introduction, by Hugh S. R. Elliot, with a note on Mill's private life by Mary Taylor. London: Longmans, 1910.

2. Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. London: Longmans, 1908.

3. John Stuart Mill. A Criticism. By Alexander Bain. London: Longmans, 1882.

SOME forty years ago or more two comments on John Stuart Mill used often to be quoted, made by the two men who were then the most prominent figures in the English world of politics. Mr Gladstone spoke of him (and, I think, also wrote of him) as the 'saint of Rationalism.' Mr Disraeli, when asked after a session's experience of the new member for Westminster what he thought of him, replied with a shrug of the shoulders, 'A political finishing governess.' Mr Gladstone's verdict, that of one who knew and valued Mill's work, was a profound and true one; Disraeli's-passed by one who probably knew nothing of Mill beyond his speeches in the House -was an obviously superficial one, indeed not a verdict at all. But taken as being what it was, a statement of the impression made by Mill upon an acute but superficial observer, who was all the more alive to mannerisms because the real man was beyond his purview, it suggests very truly the limitations of one who was in some respects a really great man, limitations apparent not in politics alone. They were in part the defects of those very qualities which won Gladstone's admiration. Mill had the educating mania, and it was largely inspired by that religious zeal for the improvement of mankind which formed part of his saintship.' From his father he had early learnt to think that if only people were thoroughly educated and freed from the dead hand of outworn institutions all would be well with the world. And greatly though his views eventually changed, this early way of looking at things left its stamp on him through life. His cult of education issued in a certain priggishness and preciseness, and a detestation of any thing vague and not clearly communicable to those whom

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he would instruct and help. It is to this side of his intellectual character that we may set down his admiration for the French intellect and his extraordinary undervaluing of such German metaphysicians as Hegel and Fichte. To this again must be ascribed his intense joy in distinct classification-which made Dumont's rédaction of Bentham (of which I shall speak later on) as inspiring and satisfying to him as Fichte and Hegel were almost physically distressing. It is the 'finishing governess' element again which made his own unique and precocious early education for years the sole matter of interest to him, and led him afterwards to analyse its results with such painful care. Every event in his life was regarded by him in its effect on his character and mind. He let nothing stand in memory as a mere fact, without a serious estimate of its educative consequences. Like a Jesuit confessor he regarded recreation only as a means to the accomplishment of the main purpose.

The truth is that there was in the nature of Mill from first to last a certain thinness of sympathy and a deficiency in geniality which contributed to the priggishness that struck Disraeli-though his sympathies were very intense in their own narrow groove. There was a lack of full humanity. He had no sense of the ludicrous. He did not enter into or understand the varieties of human character, and he was wanting in virility. These last two traits were evidenced in his believing that all men were like himself and like one another in the insignificant place which (as he maintained) the sexual instinct normally occupied in the life of mankind. He traced obvious exceptions to this rule to abnormal conditions. By a little management in education the propensity in question could, he considered, be reduced to an almost negligible quantity, and he once expressed to the present writer's father in conversation the opinion that the human race would come to an end by its ultimate complete disappearance. It is also, I think, a mark of the governess' side of Mill's character that these volumes of his letters, absorbing though they are, exert something of a strain on the logical faculty of the reader. There is little or no imagination in them. Of humour there is one gleam and only one-and it comes from no words of Mill, but from a suggestion of

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Roebuck. Mill's speeches in the House of Commons were (it seems) weakened in their effect first by an impression of hesitation as to the sequence of topics and arguments, and secondly by his manner of delivery. He had a habit, in Roebuck's words, of joining his hands behind him and rolling from side to side like a schoolboy saying his lessons.' Possibly the general effect was somewhat similar to what many of us remember who have seen and heard another great writer, the late Mr Lecky, addressing the House of Commons. Roebuck prescribed as a remedy that he should write out the heads of his speech on a card, and should stand every day, card in hand, for some minutes before a large looking-glass and rehearse systematically the coming oration.

In point of fact the early hothouse forcing of the mind of one set by his father to learn Greek at four and Latin at eight, and encouraged in destructive analysis of those natural sources of enthusiasm which most men find in national institutions and in religion, killed much while it developed much. It developed in an extraordinary degree the reasoning powers, but it tended to depress vitality and imagination, and to make the logical faculty unduly predominant. Mill associated little with other boys. He was never able to achieve any success in games or sport, and soon gave up the attempt to cultivate such pastimes. He spoke of himself as being in early life little more than a logical machine, despising sentiment on Benthamite principles. He eventually desired to awaken the faculties he had despised, but they had become partially atrophied. Sentiment, when it came to him and was systematically developed, had always in it something thin, something hectic. He inhaled his oxygen not in the fields but artificially through an air pump. This is the general character of the limitations which were responsible for Disraeli's witty and unfair saying.

It is to be regretted that the editor of Mill's Letters, who has wisely included in his selection some which have already appeared in print, should have omitted to republish the very characteristic letters of his boyhood given to the world thirty years ago by Mr Bain in his Criticism' of Mill, but long since generally forgotten. One of these especially throws the vivid light of contemporary illustration on the unique story of his early