English-speaking peoples are beginning to realise that what they call “democracy” may not be a universal panacea, and that Parliamentary and Congressional government as it flourished in the nineteenth century with two parties and a choice for the elector limited to two party hacks, instead of being a method of universal validity and altogether perfect, was a temporarily convenient method of government for a fairly homogeneous dominant middle class living under apparently stable conditions. Social developments in Western Europe evolved this class throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a national mentality was evolved concurrently. Transferred to alien soils, parliamentary institutions wilt or become weedy. And it is extremely doubtful whether in Britain, that mother of Parliaments, it is possible for the parliamentary machine to work now except in a very hectic and unsatisfactory way, unless it undergoes extensive adaptations to meet the great financial, economic, and social stresses that have still to try the British community. In a previous paper I have discussed the electoral reforms whereby Parliament or Congress could be made really representative of the national mind, would cease to be an arena for a stupid and boring party conflict, and would become a smaller assembly, a working council, alive throughout, appointing and criticising the various Ministries. But a reform of representative methods is not in itself a sufficient solution to our problem. A graver and profounder weakness both of the American and British community at the present time is the incoherence and diffuseness of public opinion. Great changes in the range and material of economic life during the last quarter of a century and the financial earthquakes that have followed the war have shattered the old homogeneous and dominant middle-class stratum on both sides of the Atlantic. That was the reservoir of public opinion, and there is nothing equivalent on the new scale to replace it. There have been bold extensions of the franchise in Britain to great classes of inexperienced and inattentive voters; Mr. Adamson’s Bill has brought us within sight of universal suffrage for every man and woman over twenty-one; but there has been no development of political education upon the same scale. Probably a third of the British voting mass after these additions--seven millions, say--will be too indifferent to political issues to vote at all. A half, another ten or eleven millions, will vote for trivial or silly reasons, and will certainly never take the slightest trouble to sustain the Parliament it has elected. Politically they will accept anything they get. They have still to learn to consider politics seriously. There remains about a sixth of the British electorate; less than five millions, a miscellany of every sort of opinion and drawn from every class, with this much in common, that it cares enough about politics to fight about them if necessary.