The news considered most important a hundred years hence will probably be news as to developments of public opinion. It is hardly conceivable that exactly the methods of Government which exist at present will satisfy the developed consciousness of the new time: and most likely the methods then adopted for the ascertainment of public opinion, and the machinery devised for giving it administrative effect, will create subject-matter for a type of journalism of which the very perceptible rudiments, though still nothing but the rudiments, already exist. If I am right in expecting great results to flow from new ideas and practice in our educational system, it is certain that the notion of political freedom will greatly extend its effect: and the unavoidable corollary is that movements of public thought will become a matter of the very keenest journalistic interest and of the very highest journalistic importance. The most probable means to be adopted for giving effect, in the middle-distance of the future, to developed public feeling must be left for discussion in a later chapter: but when we perceive that the political duty of executing the will of the people must constitute the paramount work of the constitution-builder in the latter half of the present century, we cannot fail to deduce a vast effect on newspapers. Broadly speaking, what will occur will be the result of clearer thinking. We shall very likely amend our political institutions after the characteristic English manner, which is perhaps really the safest, though it rather suggest the methods of a cobbler who repairs a boot by, from time to time, successively replacing sole, vamp, golosh and upper, until there remains a boot which is not a new boot, though it contains none of the original boot's material. Our constitution has been built (to employ a better similitude) by a series of architects who reconstruct and repair the old building, with a constant adhesion to as much of the old style as they can retain, and who will in the end present the people with a house entirely reconstructed, but bearing marks all over it of the original design. We already begin to perceive that what is regarded as political freedom at the present day has developed from the entire tyranny of absolute monarchy, through the modified tyranny of limited monarchies, still not wholly powerless, to the nearly absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now begin to delegate powers to local councils having administrative functions, and must presently delegate them to local parliaments having legislative functions on some "home-rule-all-round" principle, not because decentralisation is liked, but because the intolerable inconveniences of centralisation will make decentralisation inevitable. The more energetic propagandists of various systems of constitutional reform nearly all agree in one respect: they all desire to set up some new kind of tyranny. Few--except the philosophical anarchists, who suffer