That is to say, the system is not only the opposite of an aristocracy of birth, wealth, talent, or merit, it is not only the repudiation of hero-worship in any form—even of that lowest form of it, the worship of the demagogue of the hour—but it is a deliberate attempt to set up what the world has not yet had occasion even to coin a word for—_Kakistocracy_, a Legislature composed of the meanest and worst, chosen as such. Bad legislation is not the sole or the worst consequence of all this. Far worse is the demoralization with which political life is infected. The very idea of right and wrong, true and untrue, in politics, is in danger of being lost sight of. _L’État c’est moi_, said Louis Quatorze, and acted accordingly. _Ego sum Imperator Romanus et super grammaticam_,[1] said an old German Emperor, when an imperfection in his Latinity was hinted at. ‘The majority of the Colony is on our side, and the will of the people is above all rules of right and wrong,’ said (in effect) the Administration of Victoria during the late ‘Darling-grant’ crisis, being too obviously and palpably in the wrong to use any other kind of argument. And for the time being Louis Quatorze was for many purposes the State, Henry the Fowler’s Latin went uncorrected, and Mr. Higinbotham still bears sway by virtue of his majority. But the Bourbon _régime_ is no more, the principles of Latin Grammar remain in spite of any German Emperor, and the doctrine of the infallibility of majorities may likewise in its turn pass away. Sooner or later a democracy is likely to get weary of its puppet delegates, and to revert to the instinct which prompts men to follow strength rather than to drive weakness. The real fear is not so much lest democracy should become stereotyped and permanent in its present condition, as that the legislature, demoralised and weakened by corruption, should some day fall a too easy prey to despotism exercised by some strong unscrupulous hand, and aided perhaps by some one of the colossal fortunes, such as are being accumulated there, and which their possessors have as yet found few opportunities of spending. What form of government can be so unstable, so easily overturned as a corrupt ptochocracy?