Nor can the Prime Ministers who have successively exercised the power of nomination be justly blamed for the result. Expectations that "the Crown" would fill the Senate with men. of a different class from those who composed the Lower House —men superior in any mental or social qualifications, less involved in the faction fight, better fitted to represent commercial interests or scientific professions-were foredoomed to inevitable disappointment. "The Crown" is the Prime Minister; and no Prime Minister who was at the head of a party could help doing what the Prime Ministers on both sides have done-bestowing the nominations as rewards for party services and making the Senate, what it is, a political infirmary. Under the party system, whatever patronage is put into the hands of Government is sure to fall into the general bribery fund by which a party government is sustained. In England a peerage is now and then given for military or naval services, seldom for public services of any other kind, and an extra law lord has sometimes been created when the House, as a Court of Law, has been in absolute need of reinforcement. Otherwise, the only road to a peerage is through landed wealth and a long course of steady voting for the leader of a party.

Before we debate the question, how the Senate ought to be constituted, we must sacrifice on the altar of truth by frankly declaring our disbelief in Senates altogether. The illustrious Council from which the name is derived was not an Upper House but the government of the Roman Republic, having the executive practically under its control and the initiative of legislation in its hands. The American Senate is a special representation of the Federal as distinguished from the popular principle, in a country where, be it observed, foreign relations being in the hands of the national government, there are real federal functions to be discharged. But the other modern Senates are intended imitations of the House of Lords, and, one and all, begotten of the same illusion. The House of Lords is not a Senate, it is an old Feudal Estate, embodying not a political cast of mind different from that embodied in the House

of Commons, but a different interest, and at the dictate of that interest resisting to the uttermost every measure of change, from the Habeas Corpus Act to the mitigation of the Criminal Code, and from the mitigation of the Criminal Code to Parliamentary Reform. In no single instance, we are persuaded, can the House of Lords be shown to have discharged the supposed function of a Senate, by revising, in a calmer atmosphere and in the light of maturer wisdom, the rash resolutions of the Lower House. Its members are not older or more sedate, much less are they better informed or wiser than those of the House of Commons. They are simply members of an hereditary aristocracy maintaining the privileges of their order. For that object they readily passed the most revolutionary measure, in the worst sense of the term, recorded in the political history of Englandthe enfranchisement of the ignorant and irresponsible populace of the cities by the Tory Reform Bill of 1867. Yet the belief that they are a sage council of political revision has given birth to the double-chambered theory with the multifarious embodiments of which the British colonies and constitutional Europe are overspread.

Under elective institutions there can be no real power but that which rests on the suffrages of the people. Nominated Senates, such as the French Senate under the Restored Monarchy, and our Senate, are nullities, with a latent possibility of mischief, which was manifested the other day by the refusal of the supplies, for the purpose of a party coup d'état, by the Senate of Quebec. If an attempt is made to divide the real power by making both Houses elective, the result is a perpetual risk of collision, such as has twice produced a dead lock in Victoria, and in France came near the other day to replunging the country in civil war.

Not in complications, rivalries and conflicts is the necessary Conservative influence to be found, but in the proper constitution of a single assembly, in requiring such qualifications on the part of its electors, filling it up by such instalments, so regulating its legislative procedure that it may be an organ of

intelligence not of passion, and give effect to the settled convictions, not to the transient impulses, of the people. Then, instead of making the executive authority the prize of a perpetual faction fight, let an executive council be regularly elected by Parliament. The separation of the executive power from the legislative is a dream, though Montesquieu has established the belief that it is one of the great securities for liberty. Already Parliament appoints the Government, but in a way which makes it the government of a party, not of the nation.

Of what sort of men is the Upper House specially to consist? We have gone through projects without number, and volumes of discussion, yet we have never met with an answer to this essential question. Electoral or nominative machinery of all kinds is constructed, but nobody seems to know, or think it necessary to determine, what the machinery is to produce. Is the Upper House to be composed of old men ?—It will be impotent. Of rich men ?-It will be odious. Of the best and wisest men ?—The Lower House, which, as the more popular remains the more powerful, will be left destitute of its natural guides and controllers. From this quandary, which, if we had space, might be illustrated historically, we really see no escape.

However, the principle of two chambers is established, and we take it as it is. The only way of giving the Senate real power, and making it a living institution, is to introduce the elective principle; and this, so far as we can see, must be done in one of two ways, either by giving the election of Senators to the Local Legislatures, or by giving it to the people of each Province. Much might be said in favour of the Local Legislatures, if they were what they ought to be, genuine local councils, consisting of the worthies of the districts, and if their members would vote freely. But, as it is, to give the election of senators to them would be to put it into the pocket of the leader of the party in power, which would be very much the reverse of an improvement on open and legal nomination by the Prime Minister of the Dominion. To the people of each Province then, apparently, the election must be given;

and we must hope that the largeness of the constituencies will, to some extent, baffle wirepulling, and that petty local influences being swamped, the feeling which the people always have for eminent leaders will prevail. The substitution of a term of years for life-tenure is a matter of course it is necessary, both to secure a rotation of elections, and as a practical ordinance of superannuation. If the present Senators are allowed to retain their seats, the change will be gentle, and all fear of revolution, if anybody is so nervous as to entertain it, will be removed.

A mixed mode of election, if different constituencies could be devised, might not be without its advantages. It would introduce emulation, as well as temper dominant influences, and prevent things from running in one bad groove. But to devise different constituencies is not easy, while the principle of representation might be enfeebled and obscured. The simple measure is probably the best, and certainly it is the one most likely to enlist the support of the people.

The Upper House in England is the Court of Impeachment, a function which it has always discharged as badly as possible when any political feeling was involved. Not many years ago a Colonial Governor, who was then in danger of impeachment for arbitrary and sanguinary misrule, was publicly assured, by a member of the House of Lords, that if he was brought before that House he would find in it a sympathizing tribunal. It seems doubtful whether the Canadian Senate shares the power. But either in the Senate, or in some more judicial body, a Court of Impeachment we ought to have. Political corruption, the bane and peril of these communities, is not less capable of legal definition than treason or sedition, and it will not be put down till it is treated as a crime. An investigation in the House of Commons is not a trial, but a faction fight, as we saw in the case of the Pacific Railway Scandal. Mr. Blake is the most eminent guardian of our political morality: the subject deserves his care.

-A field for many a party skirmish will, of course, be found in the new Tariff. The Finance Minister will be expected to say whether it has fulfilled, or is likely to fulfil, its direct objects, by bringing the revenue to the level of the expenditure. If an answer to this question is not at once forthcoming, he may perhaps put in a dilatory plea on the ground that the disturbance caused by the rush of importation which took place in anticipation of the new duties, has not yet entirely subsided. There are faults, such as the tendency to discourage the use of the lighter and more wholesome wines, which he may perhaps volunteer to correct. Debate as to the ultimate effect of the system on Canadian manufactures must at present be premature and inconclusive, though it will probably be copious and warm. It will be hardly possible for the leaders of the Opposition to plant a heavy blow. What would you have done yourselves to fill the deficit?' is a question which they have not yet attempted to answer, and till they have answered it, their criticism will be without a basis. One chance of a good division they may possibly have, but it will be one of which they will be unable to avail themselves consistently with their general position. It seems that Yorkshire is not so much concerned at the exclusion of the better class of goods as at that of the goods manufactured expressly for the Colonies,' generally termed shoddy. If in one quarter there is a tendency to use us as a slaughter market, there is just as strong a tendency to use us as a shoddy market in another. To the pressure in favour of shoddy, our highly Imperialist government may, it is surmised, be inclined to yield. The manufacturers on the Government side will almost certainly rebel and offer to the Opposition one of those opportunities for casting out Beelzebub by a temporary junction with his own. forces from which party tacticians seldom shrink. But it unluckily happens that one of the grounds, if not the principal ground, of the attacks made by the Grits and their organs, especially their chief organ, on the new tariff, has been its disloyalty to British interests, and its consequent tendency to