Thus far, with their usual effective, good-humored, shortsighted common sense, with few pauses for inquiry, and with a characteristically indifferent grasp on the ultimate trend of things, have our politicians brought us.  Our politicians, I say, and not our people, because one of the distinctive features of the Revolution so far is that it has been a political rather than a popular movement.  It did not originate in the constituencies, but in the Cabinet; it was not forced upon the caucus by an aroused and indignant country, but by the caucus upon the country; nine-tenths of its momentum has been derived from above and not from below; the true centers of excitement throughout its polite and orderly progress have been the lobbies of the House and the correspondence columns of The Times; it was only at the last that the urbanities of the struggle between the “Die-hards” and their fellow Unionists furnished the public as a whole with material for a mild sporting interest.  When Roundheads and Cavaliers were lining up for the battle of Edgehill a Warwickshire squire was observed between the opposing forces placidly drawing the coverts for a fox.  The British people during the past twenty months have seemed more than once to resemble that historic huntsman.  They have answered the screaming exhortations of the politicians with whispers of more than Delphic ambiguity; they have gone unconcernedly about their pleasures and their business, to all appearances unvexed by the din of Revolution in their ears; they have presented the spectacle, more common in France than in England, of a tranquil nation with agitated legislators.

The Ministerial explanation of this lethargy and indifference is that the people had no occasion to grow excited; their “mandate” was being fulfilled, they were getting what they wanted, demonstrations were superfluous.  But no one who has read the history of the Reform Bill of 1832 or of the Chartist movement or who remembers the passions stirred up by the Franchise agitation and the Home Rule struggle of the eighties will swallow that explanation without mentally choking.

The truth probably is, first, that the multiplication of cheap distractions and enjoyments and of cheaper newspapers has not only weakened the popular interest in politics, but has impaired that faculty of concentrated and continuous thought which used to invest affairs of State with an attractiveness not so greatly inferior to that of football; secondly, that for the great masses of the democracy the politics of bread and butter have completely ousted the politics of ideas and abstractions; and thirdly, that the Constitutional issue was precisely the kind of issue in which our people had had no previous training, either actual or theoretical, and which found them therefore without any intellectual preparation for its advent.  Up till the end of 1909 we had always taken the Constitution for granted, and were for the most part comfortably