REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT FOR RUSSIA.

BY HANNIS TAYLOR, LL.D. (EDIN. AND DUB.), AUTHOR OF THE

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITU

TION," ETC., ETC.

WITH a view to ascertaining the result of the recent conference of the presidents of the Zemstvos, the representative of the Associated Press at St. Petersburg interviewed Mr. Sauverin, the veteran editor of the "Novoe Vremya," who said:

"I certainly think the conference was highly significant. It shows the necessity for a departure from the present system. Personally, I do not agree with all the Zemstvoist proposals. The memorial embodies to the last word the science of constitutional government. I think some form of national representation is bound to come. . . It would not be a curtailment of the autocratic power to summon representatives of the people, but rather a strengthening of the Imperial authority, since it would enable the monarch to know the true needs and desires of his subjects. Ex-Minister of the Interior Ignatieff's idea of a Zemstvo Parliament to sit as a consultative body is worth considering as the logical development of the Zemstvos, which would be a ready-made electoral college for the land parliament. In my opinion, it would be preferable to have two houses. The higher should take the place of the present Council of the Empire, and a part of it should be elected and a part appointed. The Lower House should be composed of members, each representing a large constituency; otherwise, the population of 150,000,000 would necessitate a too unwieldy Lower House."

Here is a clear and definite admission, from one declaring his belief that "autocracy should be preserved," that the time has come when Russia should have a bicameral parliament to be composed of "an elective body to act in a consultative capacity to the sovereign, who should retain absolute freedom to follow the recommendations of the majority or minority, as he might think best." Mr. Sauverin evidently recognizes the maxim of Sir James Mackintosh that "constitutions are not made, they grow,"

when he adds: "My belief is that the changes should be introduced gradually. The first phase should be the introduction of the elected members to the Council of the Empire, which would be a useful initiation of our statesmen and people to representative institutions." In the presence of such reflections, students of the history of representative government naturally propound to themselves the question whether, in the light of that history, it is not probable that a parliament may be rapidly evolved out of the local institutions of Russia, in such a way that a representative assembly may be built up alongside of the Autocracy, at first purely consultative, and finally supreme in the state. All who are familiar with the history of the English constitution know that the Parliament of that country was evolved, through such a process, from germs embedded in the English township, originally a village community with a constitution identical with that of the Russian mir, the primary unit of Russian state organization.

Representative government is a Teutonic invention, of which the ancient world knew absolutely nothing. To the Teutonic invaders who settled down within the limits of the Roman Empire the modern world is indebted for the principle of representation, whereby large populations are enabled to extend the organization of natural life, without loss of vitality, through representative assemblies in which widely separated local communities cooperate with the central authority through trusted men elected to speak and act in their stead. The incurable weakness of the Roman political system was its lack of the equal and concerted action of widely diffused populations through the instrumentality of representation. That lack was supplied by the Teutons, who brought with them from the forest and the steppe the germs of the representative principle embedded in the organization of their local, self-governing communities. In every one of the modern European states that have arisen out of the settlements made by the Teutonic nations on Roman soil, a serious attempt has at some time been made in the direction of representative government. The remarkable fact is that, in every Continental state in which such an attempt was made, it ended at last in failure and disappointment. By the sixteenth century, nearly every effort in the direction of representative government upon the Continent of Europe had come to an end. In England only, among the Teu

tonic nations, has the representative principle been able to maintain a continuous existence. In that way, the English nation has been able to hand it down from the barbarian epoch to modern times; in that way, England became the "Mother of Parliaments," the teacher of the science of representative government to all the world. Since the beginning of the French Revolution, nearly all of the states of Continental Europe have organized national assemblies after the model of the English Parliament in a spirit of conscious imitation. But the typical English national assembly, embodying what is generally known as the bicameral system, was not copied into the Continental European constitutions until it had first been reproduced in a modified form by the founders of the federal republic of the United States. Thus rendered popular by its successful reproduction in American constitutions, State and Federal, the English political model was followed by France, by Spain and Portugal, and by Holland and Belgium combined in the Kingdom of the Netherlands; and, after a long interval, by Germany, Italy, Austria and Japan. To the student of the science of politics, the typical English national assembly, therefore, appears not simply as the local legislature of the United Kingdom, nor even as the Imperial Parliament of the British Empire, but, higher still, as the accepted model of representative government throughout the world. Has the time come when Russia is prepared to concentrate the vast energies of her widely diffused populations through the instrumentality of a representative assembly, fashioned after a model adopted in every country in which constitutional government now prevails?

The most valuable single result, perhaps, of the application of the new science known as "Comparative Politics" to the study of institutions, is embodied in the discovery that the unit of organization in all of the Aryan nations, from Ireland to Hindustan, was the naturally organized association of kindred-the family, swelled into the clan-which, in a settled state, assumed the form of a village community, represented by the yévos of Athens, the gens of Rome, the mark or gemeinde of the Teutonic nations, and the mir of Russia. The Teutonic state built up in Britain, and known as "England," is the outcome of a process of aggregation, in which the village community, or mark, there known as the "township," "parish" or "manor," was

the unit of political organization. As Mr. Freeman has expressed it:

"The unit is the mark, roughly represented by the modern parish or manor. The shire must not be looked on as a division of the kingdom, nor the hundred or the mark as a division of the shire. The hundred is, in truth, formed by an aggregation of marks, the shire by an aggregation of hundreds, and the kingdom by the aggregation of shires. The aggregation of marks into shires is, indeed, mainly to be inferred from local nomenclature and from the analogy of other Teutonic countries, but the aggregation of shires into kingdoms is matter of recorded history."

The English state, thus built up in Britain through the aggregation of primitive local communities, preserved them as the substructure of its national life; and from them was drawn the representative principle confined at first to strictly local concerns. The English village assembly, or tun-moot, elected its own officers, and also provided for the representation of its interests in the assemblies of the hundred and the shire, where the reeve and four discreet men appeared for the township. That is the earliest illustration of the representative principle. As John Fiske has well expressed it: "In these four discreet men sent to speak for their township in the old county assembly, we have the germ of institutions that have ripened into the House of Commons, and into the legislatures of modern kingdoms and republics. In the system of representation thus inaugurated lay the future possibility of such gigantic political aggregates as the United States of America." The representative principle, which survived the Norman Conquest as a part of the machinery of the Old-English local courts, never entered into the constitution of the national council prior to the reign of John. Not until that time did the ancient practice of sending the reeve and four discreet men from the township to the county court expand into the practice of sending "four discreet men," as representatives of the shire, to the common council of the kingdom. Not until 1265 did representatives from the towns first appear in Parliament, and not until 1295 was it settled that elected representatives from both shires and towns had the right to appear regularly in Parliament. From the coming of the Conqueror down to that time, the bureaucracy which governed England in the name of the Crown was almost as absolute in national affairs as that which now

governs Russia in the name of the Tsar. When the English Commons were first called to Westminster to consult as to taxation, their position was quite as humble as that which Mr. Sauverin would now assign to the lower house of his elective assembly. As all the world knows, the growth of the power of the English Parliament was a very gradual evolution. Only after hard and prolonged struggles did it win the right, first, to participate in and then exclusively to authorize taxation; next, to participate in and control legislation; next, to control the royal administration and to depose the King himself. The secret of the result finally attained is embodied in the fact that the unit of political organization known as the "township" survived, and from its loins was drawn the vital principle of popular government, through whose agency was built up, alongside of the royal bureaucracy, a representative assembly in which the sovereign powers of the nation were concentrated and consolidated.

In the absolute and centralized monarchy of Russia, the unit of state organization is the village community known as the "mir," whose constitution is identical with that of the Teutonic mark or township, as it appeared centuries ago. While the latter has grown and borne fruit, the former has simply prolonged its childhood. When the student of politics desires to inspect an ancient institution in its primitive form, he must find it in some stagnant community in which it has not progressed. The Russian mir, as it appears to the traveller of to-day, is a vivid illustration of the village life of the founders of the English kingdom at the time the migration into Britain began. From the chapter entitled "The Mir" in Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace's book on Russia, published not very long ago, we learn that:

"In the great stronghold of Cæsarian despotism and centralized bureaucracy,' these Village Communes, containing about five-sixths of the population, are capital specimens of representative constitutional government of the extreme democratic type! When I say that the rural commune is a good specimen of constitutional government, I use the phrase in the English, and not in the Continental, sense. . . . Their constitution is of the English type a body of unwritten, traditional conceptions, which have grown up and modified themselves under the influence of ever-changing practical necessity. If the functions and mutual relations of village elder and the village assembly have ever been defined, neither the elders nor the members of the assembly know anything of such definitions; and yet every peasant knows, as if by instinct, what