h each other about that nothing. Where great questions
end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new
laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign
relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature.
There is nothing for it to enact, and nothing for it to settle.
Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being debarred
from all other kind of business, may take to quarrelling about its
elective business; that controversies as to Ministries may occupy all
its time, and yet that time be perniciously employed; that a constant
succession of feeble administrations, unable to govern and unfit to
govern, may be substituted for the proper result of Cabinet
government--a sufficient body of men long enough in power to evince
their sufficiency. The exact amount of non-elective business necessary
for a Parliament which is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be
formally stated. There are no numbers and no statistics in the theory
of constitutions. All we can say is, that a Parliament with little
business, which is to be as efficient as a Parliament with much
business, must be in all other respects much better. An indifferent
Parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave
affairs; but a Parliament which has no such affairs must be
intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.

But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature, is evidently
secondary to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two kinds of
nations which can elect a good Parliament. The first is a nation in
which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are
comfortable. Where there is no honest poverty, where education is
diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass
of the people to elect a fair legislature. The idea is roughly realised
in the North American colonies of England, and in the whole free States
of the Union. In these countries there is no such thing as honest
poverty; physical comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is
there easily attainable by healthy industry. Education is diffused
much, and is fast spreading, Ignorant emigrants from the Old World
often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves
destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where
rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of such new
communities is commonly geographical. The population i