Each party is seeking not so much to improve the government as to make it the instrument of particular theories or passions. But this surely is what a government, an executive government at least, ought not to be. A government ought to be the impartial guardian for the whole nation of law, order, property, personal rights, and the public safety; while opinion is left to shape itself by discussion, reach maturity, and at length impress itself on legislation. This whole movement is pre-eminently the work of party, and inspired by its passions. Reform in 1832 was really national; the nation earnestly desired liberation from a corrupt oligarchy. But the subsequent suffrage agitations have been mainly set on foot by the politicians for the purposes of their party war. Democracy has come. By all reflecting men its advent seems to be acknowledged, by most it is welcomed as bringing, so far as we can see or so far as experience, though chequered, informs us, an increase of happiness to the masses of mankind, and therefore, in the highest sense, to all. But it requires to be organized and regulated; otherwise the end will be anarchy and, as the inevitable consequence of anarchy, a relapse into a government of force. Republics, as we have more than once seen, are capable of suicide. The people is no more divine than kings, though its divinity was proclaimed by the Maratists; it is capable of governing itself as wrongly as any king can govern it. The ignorance, the passions, the self-interest, not only of particular classes, but of all of us alike, need to be controlled, as far as institutions can control them, and eliminated from the Councils of the State. The Americans, as was said before, have tried to organize and regulate democracy. The framers of the American Constitution—no veil of illusion being spread before their eyes by the surviving forms and names of an old monarchy—saw the problem which destiny had set before them. It was not such a problem as would be presented to them by the America of the present day, with its New York and its Chicago, its flood of foreign immigrants, and its enfranchised negroes; far less is it such a problem as Great Britain, with the populace of its great cities, its host of Radical and Secularist artisans, its uninstructed millions of farm laborers, and its disaffected Irishry presents to the British statesman. They had to deal only with the Puritan freeholders of New England and the planters of the South. Still they saw the necessity of providing a solution, and a solution they produced—one not in all respects correct, even in its day (for the mode adopted of electing the President was a fatal error), yet effective as well as deliberate, and such as has sufficed, notwithstanding the great increase of the strain upon the machinery, to shelter civilization and avert anarchy. They instituted an executive government invested with actual power and existing independently of parties in Congress, a real