Ah! what I envy the English is that security for the morrow, which they owe to a form of government no one, so to speak, thinks seriously of questioning.
The Englishman is the stanchest monarchist, and at the same time the freest man in the world, which proves that freedom is compatible with a monarchial government. There is no French Legitimist more royalist than he, there is no French Republican more passionately fond of liberty; nay, I will go so far as to say that, in France, people would be treated as dangerous demagogues, who demanded certain liberties which the English have long possessed under a monarchy, and to defend which the most conservative of them would allow himself to be rent in pieces.
At first sight, the theory of government in England appears to be most simple; two great political parties, each having its leader, whose authority is uncontested, and who takes office amid the acclamations of half the nation. Is the country threatened with danger, party spirit vanishes, Liberals and Conservatives disappear; the Englishman is supreme.
All this appears as simple as admirable. I will show farther on, however, that if there is fixity in the form of the government, there cannot be any consistency in the politics of the country.
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Things are forgotten to such an extent in England that I have rarely seen a Liberal paper revert to the fact that Lord Beaconsfield, the illustrious leader of the Conservative party, began his political life in the ranks of the Radicals, or Conservative papers remind people that Mr. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberals, began his brilliant career in the Conservative ranks. At all events, I never saw anyone reproach these great statesmen with having turned their coats. Lord Derby, who was Minister for Foreign Affairs under Lord Beaconsfield, was Colonial Minister in Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet. Punch had a caricature on the subject, and there was an end of the matter.
Such proceedings would excite contempt or indignation in France; but to judge them in England from a French point of view would be absurd.
In France, political convictions rest on the form of government. In England, everyone, or almost everyone, is of one mind on that subject; Conservatives and Liberals both will have a democracy, having for its object the material, moral, and intellectual progress of the people, with a monarchy to act as ballast.
The only difference that I see in the history of the two parties, during the last fifty years, is that the Conservatives willingly sacrifice their home policy to the prestige of a spirited foreign policy, while the Liberals pay more attention to internal politics, to the detriment, perhaps, of foreign ones.
Here it should be added that, when an Englishman accepts the task of forming a ministry, it is, in the eyes of his partisans, out of pure abnegation, to serve his country, and, in the eyes of his opponents, out of pure ambition, to serve his own interests.