ys I have tried to describe one of the mental
conditions of Parliamentary Government, which I call "rationality," by
which I do not mean reasoning power, but rather the power of hearing
the reasons of others, of comparing them quietly with one's own
reasons, and then being guided by the result. But a French Assembly is
not easy to reason with. Every assembly is divided into parties and
into sections of parties, and in France each party, almost every
section of a party, begins not to clamour but to scream, and to scream
as only Frenchmen can, as soon as it hears anything which it
particularly dislikes. With an Assembly in this temper, real discussion
is impossible, and Parliamentary government is impossible too, because
the Parliament can neither choose men nor measures. The French
assemblies under the Restored Monarchy seem to have been quieter,
probably because being elected from a limited constituency they did not
contain so many sections of opinion; they had fewer irritants and fewer
species of irritability. But the assemblies of the '48 Republic were
disorderly in the extreme. I saw the last myself, and can certify that
steady discussion upon a critical point was not possible in it. There
was not an audience willing to hear. The Assembly now sitting at
Versailles is undoubtedly also, at times, most tumultuous, and a
Parliamentary government in which it governs must be under a peculiar
difficulty, because as a sovereign it is unstable, capricious, and
unruly.

The difficulty is the greater because there is no check, or little,
from the French nation upon the Assembly. The French, as a nation, do
not care for or appreciate Parliamentary government. I have endeavoured
to explain how difficult it is for inexperienced mankind to take to
such a government; how much more natural, that is, how much more easy
to uneducated men is loyalty to a monarch. A nation which does not
expect good from a Parliament, cannot check or punish a Parliament.
France expects, I fear, too little from her Parliaments ever to get
what she ought. Now that the suffrage is universal, the average
intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are
excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long
been enslaved to authority; the French peasant cares more for standing
well with his present prefet than for anything else whatever; he is far
too ignorant to check and watch his Parliament, and far too timid to
think of doing