< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu
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THE DECLINE OF PARTY GOVERNMENT.

Peel, should fail, his attempt, like that of Peel, will have a significance which no momentary failure can annul. It announces the decline of the party system, and the advent, not immediate, perhaps, but still certain, of national government.

It is curious with what implicit faith we have all reposed upon party, as the normal, permanent, and only possible mode of carrying on a free constitution, disregarding not only the objections which reason obviously suggests to the system and the general evidences of its bad effects on politics and political character, but the facts which showed plainly enough that its foundations were giving way, and that, if this was the only basis of government, government was likely to be soon left without a basis.

Burke, in his "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent," has given at once his definition and his defense of party:

"Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that any one believes in his own politics or thinks them to be of any weight who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means toward those ends, and to employ these with effect. Therefore every honorable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution with all the power and authority of the state. As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty to contend for these situations. Without a proscription of others they are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things; and by no means, for private considerations, to accept any offer of power in which the whole body is not included; nor to suffer themselves to be led or to be controlled or to be overbalanced, in office or in council, by those who contradict the very fundamental principles on which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must stand. Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and honorable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless impostors who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and have afterward incensed them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude."

To form a rational and moral basis for party, to prevent party from sinking into faction, the party leader from becoming an "impostor," and the "generous contention for power" from degenerating into a "mean and interested struggle for place and emolument," there must be, as Burke says, a particular principle on which the members of the connection are agreed in desiring that government should be carried on. Failing such a principle, party, and the golden haze with which Burke, according to his manner, has surrounded it, vanish, and leave a faction or a void.

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