if the case demands it." Tacitus of them.

This tribe of Saxons had, by accident or wise leadership, happened upon the very country best suited to them. A fertile island, cut off from the rest of the world, and with room for all so that each one might with his family have a kingdom of his own. This with as little machinery of government as possible, and yet all ready to combine as equals in self-defence. But as they made their land productive, as they became rich, they became the prey of other peoples from northwestern Germany, and what is now the Scandinavian peninsula, and were forced to defend their possessions and their customs against Angles, Danes, and Nor

mans.

It is a curious feature of the abiding, unrelenting purpose of these Saxons to govern themselves, and to be let alone, that though they were conquered in turn by Angles, Danes and Normans, they swallowed up all three in the end, and imposed their customs, their language, their habit of mind, and their institutions upon each of the invaders in turn. They would have nothing to do with the half-developed feudalism of Angles and Danes, nor with the fully developed feudalism of William the Conqueror and his followers. The Conqueror claimed that the land was his and that every holder of land owed fealty to him personally. It took just about an hundred years for the Saxon idea to prevail over this feudalistic notion and the result was Magna Charta. The Magna Charta, wrested from King John by the Norman barons, was in reality the shaking off of personal allegiance to a chieftain by the Norman barons, aided by the Saxon gentry, who had finally imbued them also with their own love of independence and a free government. They insisted then, and have maintained ever since, that they derived their rights, their liberties, and their laws, not from a king, but from themselves. In the days of William the Conqueror their king was elective, though chosen from the reigning house. As late as 1689 the Commons voted that King James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant! They chose their own rulers, and no doubt would do so again today if necessary. It is much too long a story to go, step by step, through the recital of this development. It concerns us here

The present House of Lords itself is the direct result of the Saxon's unwillingness to bother with government, and his willingness to leave such matters to those of most leisure and most wealth, and therefore, in all probability, to those of most capacity and most experience in such matters. It was, and is, the common-sense view of government, as over against the theoretical view. The danger in such a view of government, of course, lies in the fact that the governors, whether kings, or nobles, or statesmen, may grow to feel themselves paramount, and undertake to demand from the governed what they have no right to demand; such as taxation without representation, or a full purse for the king by unjust requirements, and without rendering an account. But these peaceable Saxons, on each and every occasion when their independence has been threatened, have risen in a mass, asserted their liberties, and then left their kings or gentry again to govern. The Magna Charta, and the revolt led by Simon de Montfort, and the head of Charles I, are all warnings to whom it may concern that the Saxons are not to be meddled with, and are not to be anybody's subjects. Thus began the history, and the fact, of democratic government. Love of the land, industry, privacy, personal liberty; these were sought and found in this island by the Saxons, and they have been preserved there ever since.

The London policeman with his hand. uplifted, who has become part and parcel of the rhetorical stock in trade of American ambassadors, is the symbol of the Saxon's willingness to abide by the law, so long as the law is of his own making, and facilitates his getting about his business quickly and with a modicum of friction. That policeman is simply the embodiment of the spirit of the race which has fought off Jutes, Angles, Danes and Normans; which has broken nobles, and beheaded kings in order to be let alone to attend to their own affairs in their own way. They are not jealous of the law as are the French, because they make the law for their own convenience, and because they know that it applies with equal force to all. They do not disregard

the law as do we Americans who are overrun with amateur law-makers, because they realize that they can and do make the laws, and that to disregard rules of their own making makes either sport, or government a nuisance. The coster-monger's cart and the coroneted carriage in London streets have equal privileges, no more, no less, the one than the other. The poisonous philosophy of socialism, whether it be eleemosynary socialism, or predatory socialism, which would make the State a distributer of the surplus of the strong for the propagation of the weak, makes its way but slowly among those of Saxon blood. "If I were to be asked,” says Montesquieu, "what is the predilection of the English, I should find it very hard to say: not war, nor birth, nor honors, nor success in love, nor the charms of ministerial favor. They want men to be men. They value only two things-wealth and worth." No State can make men men. No State can produce wealth and worth. These three-men, and wealth, and worth, are produced, and produced only, where men measure themselves against men for the mastery over the fruits of the earth, without adventitious aids of any kind, and under the protection of laws that all make and all obey.

In these modern days when so many strive to become members of Parliament, and when all sorts of pressure, financial and otherwise, is brought to bear to secure a peerage, it is interesting to remember that both the House of Lords and the House of Commons owe their existence to the fact that the Saxons did not wish to be bothered by attendance at their assemblies. Somebody must go, and so one or two were chosen by each community to represent the rest; and the wise men of the Witenagemot of old, together with the heads of the great church establishments, gradually came to be looked upon as the King's counsellors, and were called together to confer upon such questions as concerned the whole commonwealth.

It is by no means a good sign at the present time that instead of wishing to attend to their own business, so many butchers and bakers and candle-stick-makers are eager to enter Parliament, to attend to other people's business. It is not the good old Saxon

mistakes and our political troubles have mostly arisen from a wrong interpretation of "government by the people." It has never meant, and can never be successful when it is interpreted as meaning, that each individual shall take an active part in government. This is the catch-penny doctrine, preached from the platform by the demagogue. The real spirit of "government by the people" is merely that they should at all times have control, and keep control, of their governors as these Saxons have done.

No one would dream of harking back to the primitive days when every man sewed together his own skins for clothes and for foot-wear, made his own hut, caught his own fish, killed each for himself his meat, and picked each for himself his berries, and was his own priest, his own physician and his own policeman. We now know that this was waste of time and energy. We find it more convenient, and more conducive to a long life, and a comfortable life, to divide ourselves up into bakers, and butchers, and tailors, and berry pickers, and priests, and policemen, and physicians. It is only in politics that we grope blindly amongst primitive methods for a solution of the problem of government. France with her fantastic theories, and what proved her horrible fiasco, influenced our beginnings, and followed by that have come the Irish with their hatred of England and the English; and the mating of the French philosophy, and the Irish fact, have turned us aside from, and made us hesitating in, our allegiance to the only form of free government which has ever been successful in the world, and which is ours by ancestral right. It must be a poor race which cannot throw up from the mass of men a certain number whose wealth, leisure, and ability fit them for the work of governing; just as others amongst us are best fitted to bake or brew, or teach or preach, or make clothes or hats, or to dig in the fields. To say that every man is fitted to govern is to hark back to the days when every man was his own huntsman, fisherman, cook and tailor.

We have millions in America who are just learning the alphabet of free government and they are still flattered by political parasites with loud voices and leather larynxes. Our parliaments and assemblies

are filled not with the brawn and brains that have made America a great nation in fifty years, but with the semi-successful, the slippery and resourceful who live on the people, and by the people, and for themselves.

He is but a mean American who believes that this will last. The time approaches when Americans will slough off this hampering political clothing, put upon them by Latin and Celtic parasites, and insist upon being governed by the best amongst them, by the wisest amongst them, by the successful amongst them, and not by those whose living is derived by governing others, because they cannot govern themselves. It is not because we are fools that the present condition continues, it is because we are weighed down with the responsibilities of nation making. We have succeeded commercially and in all material ways marvellously. In fifty years we have become the rival of the strongest, and the commercial portent to which every finger in Europe points. Let this same energy be turned upon setting our domestic political affairs in order and the change in government will be as complete, and come as quickly, as in other matters. We have allowed our idlers to govern, with a splendid honor-roll of exceptions, we shall ere long insist that our ablest shall take their places in the good old Saxon way.

Strangely enough, however, the House of Lords still remains the most democratic institution in England. It may still claim for itself to be the Witenagemot, or gathering of wise men, and one wonders why it does not defend itself along those lines.

It is not a house of birth or ancestry, for it is composed to-day to an overwhelming extent of successful men from almost every walk in life. No one cares a fig what a man's ancestry was in this matter-of-fact land if he succeeds, if he becomes rich and powerful.

William the Conqueror himself was a bastard, and his mother was the daughter of an humble tanner of Falaise.

The mother of the great Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of a plain English gentleman.

A pot-girl of Westminster married the master of the pot-house. After his death she consulted a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde married her. Mr. Hyde afterward

became Lord Chancellor, with the title of Lord Clarendon, and his wife, the former pot-girl, bore him a daughter. This daughter married the Duke of York, and became the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart, both afterward queens of England.

It is evident that if queens of England may have a barmaid for grandmother, lesser mortals need not fret on the subject of ancestry.

The Englishman would not be what he is, nor would he in the least be transmitting his very valuable Saxon heritage, if he gave up his democratic custom of an aristocracy of power for the feeble continental custom of an aristocracy of birth. What the one and the other is to-day answers the question as to the relative merits of the two systems without need of discussion. The English, though nowadays many of them do not know it themselves, are the most democratic of all nations.

William the Conqueror divided England among the commanders of his army, and conferred about twenty earldoms; not one of these exists to-day. Nor do any of the honors conferred by William Rufus, 10871100; Henry I, 1100-1135; Stephen, 1135 -1154; Henry II, 1154-1189; Richard I, 1189-1199; or John, 1199–1216.

All the dukedoms created from the institution of Edward III, 1327-1377, down to the commencement of the reign of Charles II, 1649, except Norfolk, and Somerset, and Cornwall-the title held by the Prince of Wales-have perished.

Winchester and Worcester, the latter merged in the dukedom of Beaufort, are the only marquisates older than George III, 1760-1820.

Of all earldoms conferred by the Normans, Plantagenets and Tudors, only eleven remain, and six of these are merged in higher honors.

The House of Lords to-day does not number among its members a single male descendant of any of the barons who were chosen to enforce Magna Charta. The House of Lords does not contain a single male descendant of the peers who fought at Agincourt. There is only one single family in all the realm, Wrottesleys, which can boast of a male descent from the date of the institution of the Garter, 1349.

In a word, the present House of Lords is conspicuously and predominantly a demo

cratic body, chosen from the successful of the land.

Seventy of the peers were ennobled on account of distinction in the practice of the law alone.

The Dukes of Leeds trace back to a cloth-worker; the Earls of Radnor to a Turkey merchant; the Earls of Craven to a tailor; the families of Dartmouth, Ducie, Pomfret, Tankerville, Dormer, Romney, Dudley, Fitzwilliam, Cowper, Leigh, Darnley, Hill, Normanby, all sprang from London shops and counting-houses, and that not so very long ago.

Ashburton, Carrington, Belper, Overstone, Mount Stephen, Hindlip, Burton, Battersea, Glenesk, Aldenham, Cheylesmere, Lister, Avebury, Burnham, Biddulph, Northcliffe, Numburnholme, Winterstoke, Rothschild, Brassey, Revelstoke, Strathcona and Mount Royal, Michelham, and others, too many to mention, have taken their places among the peers by force of long purses gained in trade.

Lord Belper, for example, created in 1856, is the grandson of Jedediah Strutt, who was the son of a small farmer, and made wonderful ribbed stockings.

Wealth however got, in England makes
Lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes.
Antiquity and birth are needless here:
'Tis impudence and money makes the peer.

The Saxon system still prevails. Those who push themselves to the front, those who accumulate a residue of power in the shape of leisure, are called upon to govern so that the others need not be bothered by such matters. It has been harder in some ages than in others for the man, unassisted by birth, to rise. But there has been no time in England when it has been wholly impossible. As a consequence of this, there is probably no body of men in the world who combine such a variety of experience and knowledge amongst them House of Lords. There are one or more representatives of every branch of human industry and professional skill.

the

Strange as it may seem, there is no assembly where a man could go-granted that all the peers were present-where he would be more certain of getting sound ad

vice upon every subject from higher mathematics and abstruse law, down to the shoeing of a horse or the splicing of a cable.

Why the English themselves or, at any rate, certain of their number, wish to abolish this assembly of the picked brains and ability in every walk in life, from literature and chemistry to beer-brewing and railroad building, I, as an American, cannot understand. It is the culmination of the essential philosophy of Saxondom. This is what the race has been at for two thousand years, not to be too much governed by, but to permit to govern, those who have proved themselves most capable of doing so.

The average number of barons summoned to Parliament by Edward II was 74; the average of the reign of Edward III was 43. At the beginning of the reign of Henry IV the lay members of the House of Lords consisted of 4 dukes, 1 marquis, 10 earls, and 34 barons. Henry VIII only assembled 51 peers in his Parliament; while only 82 sat in the first Parliament of James I; and 117 in the first Parliament of Charles I. At the end of the reign of Charles II there were but 176 names on the roll of the Lords. The roll was increased to 192 peerages before the death of William III; to 209 before the death of Anne; to 216 before the death of George I; to 229 before the death of George II; to 339 at the death of George III; to 396 before the death of George IV; to 456 at the death of William IV; to 512 in 1881; to 541 in 1892; and the total number at the present time (1908) including Spiritual and Law Lords is 853, 200 of whom have been created since 1882, and nearly half of them since 1830.

Ah, but some one answers, suppose these men govern badly, or suppose they cease to represent the nation, or suppose the sons of these men are not of the calibre of their fathers. The last supposition is easily answered. We have seen already what a mushroom assembly it is from the point of view of ancient lineage. They are by no means all gentlemen, in the technical sense of that word; and by no means without exception worthy. But that only adds the necessary human factor of fallibility.

The adult males in a Town Meeting in Hingham, Massachusetts, for example, could trace back to male ancestors, who attended that same Town Meeting an hundred years before, in greater numbers, in

proportion to their total number, than could the members of the House of Lords to ancestors who had sat in that same Chamber. Nor is it easy to see wherein they fail to represent the nation, since they come from every and all classes; nor why they should govern badly, since they are chosen only after proving themselves to be of superior ability, and sound judgment. It is true that a son may not turn out to have the same ability as his father, but if the son of a Rothschild has ability enough to keep the money his father made, he must, in these days of liquid securities, be a man of no small ability. Those who are weaklings do not last long in the hurly-burly of the modern world. We have seen how very few peers are the male descendants of houses dating back any distance. God and nature turn out the incompetents almost as quickly as would the electorate. The chances of any living man having a male descendant able to keep what was left him, and also able to get more, and beget more, an hundred years after his time, are very small indeed.

Indeed this system, evolved from sound Saxon sense, has done more than anything else to produce that wholeness in the English social body which is a salient feature of English life. There are, or at any rate have been, until very lately, fewer disquieting social and political segregations due to class distinctions in England than in any other nation in the world.

Grandsons, and younger sons, of peers drift back into the upper middle class, and remain there unless they rise by their own exertions; while there is a continual absorption of the strong, the competent, and the successful, into the peerage. This mixes up and leavens all classes. Noble sons become commoners, noble commoners become peers.

This is what explains the existence of the House of Lords in so democratic a country as England. It exists because it is the most democratic institution in England, and because in the long run it has been recognized as an assembly whose opinion is as nearly as possible the opinion of a concensus of the competent.

But here again we must bear in mind that we are neither defending nor attacking. This upper chamber so nearly represents what these early Saxons were, perhaps not in its details aware of, striving to produce

as a solution of government with as little government as possible, and that, by those with the leisure and capacity to do it, that it deserves attentive study.

These people, who have governed more of the world, and a far larger population, than any other people since time began, deserve respectful consideration for their methods in, and their philosophy of, government. Any socialistic sneering, or republican ribaldry, on the subject of the British system of government, must necessarily react upon the foolish one who indulges in them. The ready answer is: We are taking charge of one in every five square miles, and one in every five inhabitants of the globe; if you can do it better, why do you not do it?

It is a notable feature of the history of this great governing people, that they have had little desire to take part in the governing themselves. The gathering of the wise men, the assembly, in short, at which the nation sat in council, was open to all, but by a natural process was reduced to the attendance of those who could afford the time and the money to go. By an easy step those who had the time and the money gradually became the great ones of the land.

William the Conqueror only imitated the example of his predecessors in calling together the wise and the great of the nation to consider the customs, and thence to determine the laws, of the Kingdom.

It was from Simon de Montfort who led the freemen against the barons grown too proud, conquered them, and summoned a Parliament by directing the sheriffs to return two knights for each county, and two burgesses for each borough in the kingdom; and there you have the beginning of Parliament. They were not clamoring to govern, but they found themselves forced to take a hand lest the barons should grow to think governing their right.

The statute of a generation later than this time, and which still remains on the statute book, begins by declaring that no tax or aid shall be taken without the goodwill and assent of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other freemen of the land.

The profound and real difference between the philosophy of democracy and the philosophy of aristocracy is that the former emphasizes the identity of men, and the