Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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Democracy and Liberty - William Edward Hartpole Lecky


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years, passed through the common gaols.54 The great diminution of ordinary crime in England is especially remarkable, because both in France and in the United States there has been, in the present generation, a great and deplorable increase.

      All this is, no doubt, compatible with the growth of some special forms of vice. It may perhaps be compatible with a decline of those stronger and more robust qualities that chiefly lead to political greatness. Whether in this last field there has been any decadence in England is a question on which it is difficult to pronounce. The last occasion in which England was engaged in a life-and-death struggle against overwhelming odds was in the Indian Mutiny; and, in that now distant crisis, it must be owned that there was no failing in the stronger, fiercer, and more tenacious qualities that have made England what she is. Amid all the much obtruded sentimentalisms of our time there are indications that the fibre of the race is still unimpaired. The old love of manly sports was never more abundantly displayed; in the great fields of adventure and discovery, in the forms of commercial and industrial enterprise that most tax the energies and resources of men, modern Englishmen bear their full part, and no other people are doing so much to explore, subdue, and civilise fardistant and savage lands.

      Fortunately, in these two cases the false steps that had been taken did not prove irrevocable. The Minister for India (Sir Henry Fowler), to his infinite credit, had the courage to insist at all hazards upon revising them, and he found sufficient patriotism in the Opposition to enable him to secure the support of a large majority in the House of Commons. Seldom indeed in recent years has the chord of genuine public spirit in that House been so powerfully and so successfully struck. But the original faults were very grave, and they illustrate the dangers to which democratic parliamentary government with a weak executive exposes the great interests of the Empire.

      The blame must be divided between both parties. In both parties the minister representing India has, I believe, usually done his best, short of resigning his office; but when a small group of voters may turn the balance, the great interests of India are but too likely to be sacrificed to the party game. It is often said that England holds India by the sword; but this, though largely, is not wholly true. If the belief of the great masses of the Indian people in the essential integrity and beneficence of English rule is ever shaken, one of the chief pillars of our power will have been destroyed.


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