Studies in literature Author:John Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT.1 " If the government of the Many," says the distinguished author of the volume before us, " be really inevitable, one would have ... more »thought that the possibility of discovering some other and newer means of enabling it to fulfil the ends for which all governments exist would have been a question exercising all the highest powers of the strongest minds, particularly in the community which, through the success of its popular institutions, has paved the way for modern Democracy. Yet hardly anything worth mentioning has been produced on the subject in England or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, is strangely to ignore three or four very remarkable books that have been published within the last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have excited immense attention and discussion, andthat are the work of minds that even Sir Henry Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We are no adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, but there are important public men who think that his work on the Election of Representatives is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the Principia was in natural philosophy. J. S. Mill's volume on Representative Government, which appeared in 1861, was even a more memorable contribution towards the solution of the very problem defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was the older Mill's article on Government in 1820 to the political difficulties of the eve of the Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on Parliamentary Government failed in making its expected mark on legislation, but it was worth mentioning because it goes on the lines of the very electoral law in Belgium which Sir Henry Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most respectful attention — an attention, I suspect, which it is as little likely to receive from either of o...« less