The Government of England (Vol. I)

by A. Lawrence Lowell

Although Parties are Universal.

The absence of treatises on the subject is all the more remarkable because the phenomena to be studied are almost universal in modern governments that contain a popular element. Experience has, indeed, shown that democracy in a great country, where the number of voters is necessarily large, involves the permanent existence of political parties; and it would not be hard to demonstrate that this must in the nature of things be the case. That parties exist, and are likely to continue to do so, has provoked general attention. By all statesmen they are recognised as a factor to be reckoned with in public life; and, indeed, efforts have been made in various places to deal with them by law. In the United States, for example, the local caucuses, or conventions of the parties, and their methods of nominating candidates, have of late years been regulated by statute; while in Switzerland and Belgium, elaborate schemes of proportional representation have been put into operation to insure a fair share of seats to the groups in the minority.

Modern View of Parties.

But if political parties have become well-nigh universal at the present time, they are comparatively new in their modern form. No one in the eighteenth century foresaw party government as it exists to-day, enfolding the whole surface of public life in its constant ebb and flow. An occasional man like Burke could speak of party without condemnation;[436:1] but with most writers on political philosophy parties were commonly called factions, and were assumed to be subversive of good order and the public welfare. Men looked at the history with which they were familiar; the struggles for supremacy at Athens and at Rome; the Guelphs and Ghibelines exiling one another in the Italian republics; the riots in the Netherlands; the civil war and the political strife of the seventeenth century in England. It was not unnatural that with such examples before their eyes they should have regarded parties as fatal to the prosperity of the state. To them the idea of a party opposed to the government was associated with a band of selfish intriguers, or a movement that endangered the public peace and the security of political institutions.

Foreign observers, indeed, point out that for nearly three hundred years political parties have existed in England, as they have not in continental countries; and that the procedure of the House of Commons has consistently protected the Opposition in its attacks upon the government.[437:1] This is true, and there is no doubt that even in the seventeenth century party struggles were carried on both in Parliament and by pamphlets and public speeches, with a freedom unknown in most other nations; but still they were a very different thing from what they are now. They were never far removed from violence. When the Opposition of those days did not actually lead to bloodshed, it was perilously near to plots and insurrection; and the fallen minister, who was driven from power by popular feeling or the hostility of Parliament, passed under the shadow at least of the scaffold. Danby was impeached, and Shaftesbury, his rival, died a refugee in Holland. With the accession of the House of Hanover, and the vanishing of the old issues, political violence subsided. The parties degenerated into personal factions among the ruling class; and true parties were evolved slowly by the new problems of a later generation.

"His Majesty's Opposition."

The expression, "His Majesty's Opposition," said to have been coined by John Cam Hobhouse before the Reform Bill,[437:2] would not have been understood at an earlier period; and it embodies the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to the art of government—that of a party out of power which is recognised as perfectly loyal to the institutions of the state, and ready at any moment to come into office without a shock to the political traditions of the nation. In countries where popular control of public affairs has endured long enough to be firmly established, an Opposition is not regarded as in its nature unpatriotic. On the contrary, the party in power has no desire to see the Opposition disappear. It wants to remain in power itself, and for that reason it wants to keep a majority of the people on its side; but it knows well that if the Opposition were to become so enfeebled as to be no longer formidable, rifts would soon appear in its own ranks. In the newer democracies, such as France and Italy, there are large bodies of men whose aims are revolutionary, whose object is to change the existing form of government, although not necessarily by violent means. These men are termed "irreconcilables," and so long as they maintain that attitude, quiet political life with a peaceful alternation of parties in power is an impossibility.

Conditions of Good Party Government.

The recognition of the Opposition as a legitimate body, entitled to attain to power by persuasion, is a primary condition of the success of the party system, and therefore of popular government on a large scale. Other conditions of success follow from this.

Opposition must not be Revolutionary.