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Ingenious manufacturers prepare an excellent substitute for butter out of the vilest refuse, and my grocer may not be clearly alive to the difference between the wholesome product of a country dairy and the oleomargarine whose origin and history are different, but which may serve present needs" as a substitute, although the "historical deduction" as to its origin implied in selling it as dairy butter may be false. I consume my oleomargarine, flattering myself that it is butter and am none the worse, though perhaps it may be a trifle less digestible. The morality of the transaction is not good, but still not quite so bad as that of the imagined falsification of Deuteronomy.

How can men, professing to be servants of Him who came "to bear witness to the truth," have any respect for documents whose authors must have been morally on a level with Flint Jack and dishonest grocers? How can they expect us to go to church and listen to them when reading or preaching from these old forgeries, which we cannot believe if we believe the doctrine of their modern expositors? It is surely time for even "outsiders" to protest against such inconsistency, and especially for Christian naturalists, who find the sacred name of Science prostituted by this pseudognosis, to make their voices heard in favour of fair and honest exposition of the Bible, a book to which they owe so much, and which, in its treatment of nature, is so greatly superior to most other literature. I am not done with this subject, and trust that I may have an opportunity to pursue it further on a future occasion, when I propose to refer to the Antediluvian Age and the Deluge, which may bring up another question in which Science is interested, namely, that of Miracle as related to facts in physical science and to the laws of

nature.

J. WILLIAM DAWSON.

3 M

VOL. LV.

MADAME FRANCE AND HER

BRAV GÉNÉRAL.

THE political problem in France is one of deep interest beyond the

borders of the Republic. For it raises anew in the Centennial of the Revolution the great question whether there is or whether there can be in a democratic State any interdict imposed or maintained upon the absolute authority of universal suffrage. In England, politicians have accustomed themselves to regard the clearly expressed will of a majority of the electors as decisive. With us the phrases popular sovereignty, the will of the people, self-government, have come to mean in practice this: that there is no appeal either in the law or the constitution from the will of a majority of the electors as shown at a general election. The British householder is as absolute as the Tzar. As long as he is in doubt, other powers exist. When he has made up his mind, they simply disappear. The utmost that the most fervent partisans of the House of Lords now venture to maintain is that the Second Chamber may interpose for a season in order to place beyond. all doubt the fact that the electorate has really made up its mind. But when that mind is made up beyond all doubt its decisions are obeyed.

General elections have come to be more and more of plebiscites, and the voice of the people, as audible at such elections, has come to be regarded as the only English equivalent of the voice of God. The people are a law unto themselves. No law is superior to their will.

Their votes are the source of law.

When they vote it is in order to declare what laws shall be abrogated or what laws shall be passed. It is becoming more and more impossible, therefore, for Englishmen even to imagine that the will of the voting majority for a time being can be or ought to be subjected to any limitation.

In France, however, the home of the Revolution, where men deal

much more than they do in England in the magniloquent phrases which assert the uncontrolled sovereignty of the nation, the plebiscitary doctrine is still regarded by many politicians as a damnable heresy. This was bluntly expressed by M. Reinach in the République Française, after General Boulanger's election for Paris, when he wrote:

"The will of the people, if it presumes to go against the law, is that of a drunken pasha; the duty of a Republican magistrate is to crush it.”

The conception of the existence of a magistrate upon whom was imposed the duty of crushing the will of the people is so novel to the average British elector that he will probably be revolted at it. Yet we have only to turn to the United States to find in full force and practical operation a number of effective checks and limitations upon. the national will-checks and limitations which impose upon the Republican magistracy in certain contingencies the duty which M. Reinach declares is imposed on the French Presidency. The will of the people, no matter how clearly expressed in plebiscitary elections, cannot effect any alteration in the American Constitution until certain rigorously imposed conditions, entailing the delay of years and the patient and prolonged verification of the force and persistency of the national will, have been scrupulously complied with. No majority, no matter how decisive, of the American people can place a law on the Statute-book which conflicts with the written constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court; whereas, in England, there is no law and no institution which cannot be thrown into the melting-pot as soon as the British householder has had an opportunity of clearly making known his will. The only check upon the impatient will of the democracy is the Septennial Act. Once in seven years the householder becomes an autocrat, and those who are curious about such things will find in the agitation for shorter Parliaments the most significant and possibly the most dangerous symptom of the growth of what may be termed plebiscitary absolutism in Great Britain.

Lord Salisbury has frequently made known his anxiety for the adoption of American safeguards against the uncontrolled caprice of the voting majority, Democracies are, however, impatient of restrictions which impede the making of their will immediately executive; in England the natural forces of the national sluggishness have hitherto been potent enough to conceal and to minimize the dangers against which every constitution builder seeks to guard. We can afford to take the risk. But because we can do so, it does not necessarily follow that other nations can follow our example. In England we can afford, or at least we have hitherto been able to afford, to allow the voting majority to become periodically autocratic. If we make a mistake at one election we can rectify it at the next. That is because in England there is no power superior to the electorate, and

it is only in countries where the electorate represents the supreme force that it can safely be invested with supreme power that is immediately executive. If that is necessary to the full exercise of national sovereignty, then it is well to recognize that France has not the conditions under which alone national sovereignty can be exercised. English people do not realize, and fortunately for themselves are never likely to realize, the enormous difference which the existence of an immense army makes in the conditions of government. We can do as we please, because whatever blunders we make nothing is irreparable. It is impossible for a free community, in which the soldier is an insignificant unit among the mass of citizens, to part with its freedom. We cannot, even if we wished it, vote ourselves into slavery. The French have that privilege. If for a moment we were to be seized with the caprice of servitude, we should no sooner experience its evils than we should resume our liberty. But in countries where there is a huge army, popular liberty, in the English sense, is impossible.

That is the fundamental distinction between England and France, and that is the difference which must never be lost sight of in attempting to form a just judgment upon the policy of our neighbours. The citizen cannot abdicate in England. In France, if for a single moment he were to lay down his prerogatives, he could never regain them except at the price of a revolution. We may make Mr. Gladstone dictator, or Lord Salisbury, under the veil of Constitutionalism. But as a breath has made them so a breath can unmake them. In France it is otherwise. In the Republic there exists, side by side with citizenship, the armed nation. As long as the citizen retains firm grasp of the Executive power, the army will do his bidding. But, if in a moment of lassitude or impatience, he hands over the Executive power, the army can be used to prevent any further exercise of his sovereignty. If once, by any fluke, any individual, be he wise or foolish, has succeeded in scrambling into the place from which commands can be issued to the men with muskets, all constitutional safeguards disappear. Power passes from the men who vote to the men who shoot, and although the latter are the former in uniform, the dire enchantment of military discipline renders them the obedient instrument for the destruction of their own liberties. The man who wields the Executive power in France can order 2,500,000 adult Frenchmen to shoot whom he pleases, and they are bound to obey. An army is of necessity an unreasoning machine. It is a tremendous engine created, from first to last detail of its organization, in order to be the facile and obedient instrument of the will of the Executive authority. Hence the enormous peril to which free institutions are exposed in the French Republic; hence the need for placing the most rigorous restrictions upon all ambitions that seem to tend towards the estab

lishment of what the Americans call the One Man Power. For the one man who sits in the chair of the Executive is no longer a mere man. He is a being who can will with the force of 2,500,000 rifles, and can speak with the voice of all the artillery of France. Until Europe disarms, liberty in the English sense, popular government in the English sense, national sovereignty in the English sense, are impossible in France. The shadow of the sword obscures the light of freedom, and all that can be hoped for is a more or less wretched pis aller which will do duty as a substitute for liberty. A man who drives along a turnpike road can indulge in vagaries one-thousandth part of which would be fatal on the unfenced edge of an abyss. France is always on the edge of the abyss. Hence the peril of Boulangism. France is the last country in the world where men can afford to play tricks with the securities which the mature wisdom of the framers of the Constitution has enacted for the preservation of the liberties of the people.

II.

The Centenary of the Revolution, which has just been celebrated by the opening of the Exhibition in Paris, curiously coincides with the culmination of Boulangism. For a hundred years France has been experimenting with political systems, with the result that she has not to this day developed in the minds of the majority of the people the elementary principle of popular representative government. The evil spirit of absolute power is not exorcised even by the charm of a revolution. The demoralizing influence of despotism cannot be cut out like a tumour even with the knife of the guillotine. Rather is it like a cancer which, when the surgeon has removed it from one place, forms again in another. France has never purged herself of the virus of absolutism. Self-government in the English sense is still foreign to the traditions, the instincts, and the deepest convictions of the French. The proof of this is that France is at this moment divided into three camps. There are the Boulangists of all shades, whose one idea of saving France is to put a soldier into the saddle in the view that they will be able to induce him to ride in the direction of their hopes; there are the anti-Boulangists, who are ready to resort to almost any expedient in order to prevent the majority of Frenchmen, if they are Boulangists, imposing their will upon the minority; and there are the Revolutionary Socialists, to whom both Boulangist and anti-Boulangist are but fit to be used as fuel for the burning, who hold aloof from politics, and whose whole expectation is fixed upon the general overturn that is to inaugurate the millennium.

The very idea of bowing to the will of the majority of the adult persons in the community is alien to the whole political genius of the