therefore, to face a tremendous difficulty; we have to induce this 'self-satisfied, stupid, inert mass of men to admit its own insufficiency.' That is hard enough; but it is still harder to suggest remedies, and hardest of all to secure their application. Bagehot discusses Hare's scheme, which Mill had recently declared to provide a panacea, and shows—unanswerably, I think—how it would only lead to the supremacy of caucuses and machine-made politics. He makes a suggestion or two of his own, life-peerages and so forth; but of them it is enough to say that the insufficiency is only too palpable. The democracy is too strong to be hampered by constitutional devices, and very unlikely to adopt any measures deliberately intended to fetter its own powers of action. 'I can venture to say,' he observes in the last addition to his book on the Constitution, 'what no elected Member of Parliament can venture to say, that I am terribly afraid of the ignorant multitude of the new constituencies. We may have a "glut" of stupidity.' Probably, the opinion and the reluctance to utter it are both stronger than when Bagehot wrote (1872). To the democrat, Bagehot's despondency will appear as a proper penalty of his cynicism. One
