opposing forces placidly drawing the coverts for a fox. The British
people during the past twenty months have seemed more than once to
resemble that historic huntsman. They have answered the screaming
exhortations of the politicians with whispers of more than Delphic
ambiguity; they have gone unconcernedly about their pleasures and their
business, to all appearances unvexed by the din of Revolution in their
ears; they have presented the spectacle, more common in France than in
England, of a tranquil nation with agitated legislators.

The Ministerial explanation of this lethargy and indifference is that
the people had no occasion to grow excited; their "mandate" was being
fulfilled, they were getting what they wanted, demonstrations were
superfluous. But no one who has read the history of the Reform Bill of
1832 or of the Chartist movement or who remembers the passions stirred
up by the Franchise agitation and the Home Rule struggle of the
eighties will swallow that explanation without mentally choking.

The truth probably is, first, that the multiplication of cheap
distractions and enjoyments and of cheaper newspapers has not only
weakened the popular interest in politics, but has impaired that
faculty of concentrated and continuous thought which used to invest
affairs of State with an attractiveness not so greatly inferior to that
of football; secondly, that for the great masses of the democracy the
politics of bread and butter have completely ousted the politics of
ideas and abstractions; and thirdly, that the Constitutional issue was
precisely the kind of issue in which our people had had no previous
training, either actual or theoretical, and which found them therefore
without any intellectual preparation for its advent. Up till the end of
1909 we had always taken the Constitution for granted, and were for the
most part comfortably unaware that it even existed. We had never as a
nation, or never rather within living memory, troubled ourselves about
"theories of State," or whetted our minds on the fundamentals of
government. There is nothing in our educational curriculum that
corresponds with the _instruction civique_ of the French schools, nor
have we the privilege which the Americans enjoy of carrying a copy of
our organic Act of Government in our pockets, of reading it through in
twenty minutes, and of hearing it incessantly expounded in the
class-room and the Press, debated in the national legislature, and
inter