them certain civil functions which they desire to exercise,such as the validation of marriage contracts. It may give certain religious associations special opportunities of religious teaching in schools where secular instruction is supported from public funds. In these ways a certain amount of inducement might be given to a Church to avoid as far as possible conflict with Government, without anything like establishment or endowment.

But, secondly, endowment may be given in various minor degrees, without converting the clergy generally into salaried servants of Government. Thus, for instance, immunity from taxation may be granted to the whole or part of the property devoted to religious uses with the approval of the State. Another degree of endowment is by the selection and payment of religious teachers in certain cases in which the State is specially bound to make provision for religious teaching and worship: i.e. in the case of persons supported from public funds, such as adults in workhouses and prisons, and soldiers and sailors, and children in pauper and reformatory schools. If this provi

sion be made in such a manner as to avoid proselytism as far as possible, a substantial subvention-which the recipients will hesitate to imperil-may be thus given to one or more religious societies, without the cost entailed by an adequate endowment of religious worship and teaching for the community generally; and without encountering -to any serious extent-the awkward dilemma of either endeavouring to make one set of religious opinions prevail over others held by equally educated persons, or of endeavouring to moralise the community by imparting a number of mutually inconsistent beliefs.

If,

A stronger means of control without anything like establishment may be exercised in the form of a supervision of the wealth of Churches derived from private sources. indeed, the expenses of religious teaching and worship are defrayed by contributions from the incomes of its members, it will be difficult for Government to interfere in the employment of such contributions, without measures

of violent and invidious repression: but if they are paid from funds bequeathed to form a permanent endowment for the association, the case is different. Here, in the first place, Government may refuse to admit any religious society to the position of a corporation capable of holding and administering property, unless its organisation fulfils certain conditions, framed with the view of preventing its 'quasi-government' from being oppressive to individual members of the association or dangerous to the State.1 Secondly, Government may take advantage of a collision to bring the funds of any such society permanently under its control, in pursuance of its general duty of supervising the management of wealth bequeathed to public objects and revising the rules under which it is administered, in the interest of the community at large. And it is to be observed that, apart from any question of overt conflict between Church and State, there are special grounds for the general vigilance and occasional intervention of Government in the case of bequests for religious purposes. Firstly, at the point of death the influence of the priesthood is likely to be especially strong, from the belief that they have exceptional means of predicting—and even, perhaps, of determining— the future happiness and misery of the dying person; while at the same time his personal interest-of a mundane kind -in the employment of his wealth after death is then at its minimum. For this reason, it may be necessary to place special restrictions on testation for religious uses, rendering bequests or gifts made under the imminent fear of death liable to be invalidated as such. But further, the bequest of funds to be permanently employed in payment of persons teaching particular doctrines is liable to supply a dangerously strong inducement to the conscious or semi-conscious perpetuation of exploded errors, which, without this support, would gradually disappear: hence it should be the duty of Government to

1 For instance, in New York, it appears to have been the intention of the legislature-in a general Act for the incorporation of religious societies-to "place the control of the temporal affairs of the religious corporations in the hands of a majority of the corporators, independent of priest, bishop, presbytery, or synod, or other ecclesiastical judicatory."

watch such bequests with special care, and to intervene when necessary, to obviate the danger just indicated, by modifying the rules under which ancient bequests are administered.1

1 This principle is of course applicable to other endowments besides those devoted to religious teaching.

Note.-It may be noticed that some interference in the employment of funds for religious purposes may be forced on Government by disputes within the bodies it may have to determine which of the disputing sections has the real claim to endowments. I observe, however, that the Supreme Court of Illinois decided, in an action for wrongful dismissal, that the "free exercise of religious profession "- which the constitution of Illinois guarantees — is incompatible with the claims of civil courts to decide whether the judgments of the judicial authorities of the Church are in accordance with the laws or Canons of the Church.

CHAPTER XXIX

PARTIES AND PARTY GOVERNMENT

§ 1. By parties I mean political combinations, designed for indefinite duration, and having distinctive aims and opinions on some or all of the leading political questions of controversy in the state in which they are formed. It is obvious that such combinations may be connected with illegal acts in various ways, just like the more temporary associations for special political objects discussed in the last chapter, and may require similar repression. Such repression, however, is likely to be difficult and dangerous when it has to be applied to a large and important political party; and party strife that reaches this degree of violence must be regarded as an inflammatory disease of the body politic, for the cure of which no general rules can be laid down,except that every effort should be made to subdue it by the removal of real grievances, in order to avoid or shorten the application of the repressive method. But political parties

have for the student of politics an interest of a different kind, from their tendency, when perfectly legal and orderly in their aims and methods, to modify importantly the normal working of representative institutions; and it is from this point of view that I propose to consider them in the present chapter.

It is difficult to say how far the character and extent of the effects of parties on representative government could have been predicted from a general knowledge of human nature. Certainly nothing like what has actually taken place, in England and the United States, in which the

modern1 representative system has had the longest trial, seems to have been foreseen by earlier writers who have discussed this system. The authors of the Federalist (1788), throughout their careful and minute examination of the probable working of the newly-framed constitution of the United States, never seem to have imagined that the system they were considering would have a predominant tendency to group the citizens into two main parties, competing for victory at all elections: the operation of party is only discussed under the name of "faction as an evil against which precautions have to be taken; and Madison, when expounding the advantages offered by the new constitution, in reducing the danger of faction, lays stress on the "greater security afforded by the probable greater variety of parties against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest." Even Story, writing in 1833, seems to have no foresight of the party-system by which the constitution of the United States was destined to be worked during the next half-century; for instance, he quotes with emphatic approval, and without any qualifying comment, a summary of the President's duties, in which he is simply directed to "disregard the bias of party" in the appointment of subordinate officials. And even J. S. Mill, writing in 1860, hardly seems to contemplate a dual organisation of parties as a normal feature of representative institutions.

" 2

Parties of some sort, indeed, based on agreement in principle or community of interest, or perhaps most frequently on a combination of the two, are generally recognised by English writers, of the last as well as the present century, as an inevitable incident in popular government; and, since Burke, the prevailing tendency of our writers has been to view their operation with tolerant acquiescence, if

1 Representative assemblies of a certain kind, with various degrees of power, have had a nearly continuous existence from the later middle ages downward, in several European countries. But their nature and conditions, until very recent times, have diverged so widely from the institutions which we have been led to consider, that their experience throws but little light on our present question. 2 Federalist, No. X.

3 See Constitution of the United States, Book III. ch. xxxvii. § 1527.