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had been a bonbon. Perhaps he did not care about the matter any larger number of damns' than did the nation; perhaps who knows? —he had an astuteness beyond his years, and gently thrust his tongue in his cheek as he performed the act of deglutition. Anyhow, he stood pledged to it. The oath of allegiance which the State officials took on his accession differed essentially from the oath of fealty to his predecessors. The old oath pledged them to obey the sovereign as an absolute despot. Now the officials swore, indeed, whole-hearted allegiance to the king as king, but obedience only to the concurrent orders of the king and his ministers-of the 'king in council' in fact. And so a bloodless and a sweeping revolution had been enacted. The outside world was told of it, and marvelled after its dilettante fashion. It shared with a Derby day and a sensation divorce case the honour of having several dozen leading articles devoted to it, written by omniscient gentlemen having easy access to the Universal Gazetteer; and no doubt Mr. Frederick Martin made a note of the phenomenon for incorporation into his Statesman's Year-Book. The people of Burmah went on placidly not caring two damns.'

The experiment appeared to be working well. The council met and deliberated daily. Strict rules were enacted as to the secrecy of its proceedings. Dissentients from the opinion of its majority were taken bound to accept the overruling of the latter, were prohibited from protesting, and were forbidden to make public property of cabinet secrets. The new constitution was being gradually fulfilled. All irregular taxes were abolished. All royal trading was done away with, except as regards a few contracts in which private interests were concerned, and notice was given that these contracts were not to be renewed. The country was insensibly breathing more freely; but there was some captious dissatisfaction as a matter of course. There were complaints that the current work of the nation, legal and financial, was being neglected, while the supreme council, the duty of whose members it was to conduct that work, was maturing the details of the new constitution, and sitting in imperial deliberation, to the neglect of bureau work. These complaints are not wholly unknown in a realm of which most of us have a more familiar knowledge than of Burmah. The ministers, no doubt, were partly playing with the new toy, but it is obvious that much serious work lay in the path of the new council. And the temporary evil would have cured itself, as do so many evils when let alone. Each member used to bring to the council the more important matters of his own department, explain them, and take the collective sense anent them.

Gradually affairs were getting into good order for Burmah; and the reformed horizon seemed so settled that the gay young bloods who had gathered about the person of the young king, saw the oldestablished avenues to good things for themselves-good appointments, a morsel of eating,' and so forth-gradually but too surely

getting stopped up. The aristocratic 'jingoes' about the palace got on the rampage, and determined to upset the new coach. The overturn was sensationally sudden. The king, although he had regularly attended the council, had been almost dumb therein. It was as if he were sitting dutifully at the feet of the administrative Gamaliels who were its senior members. But one morning, in the middle of last month, he suddenly broke out into vehement invective against certain of the ministers composing it, denouncing them as corrupt bloodsuckers, who were traitors to the national weal. That there was reason, and to spare, for his objurgations, is true enough; whether he launched them in indignant singleness of heart, or whether they were a mere pretext, taken avail of for a purpose, is quite another question. Next day, during the sitting of the council, the king gave his order that two of its members, the Magwè' Menghyi-the King-maker-the senior minister of the realm--and the Yenang-young' Menghyi, the junior minister of the first rank-he who had been an active framer of the new constitution and the framer of the new oath of allegianceshould be placed under arrest, and not be allowed to leave the garden in which is the council-house. There was apprehended at the same time a minister of the second rank-a 'Woonduck-who was generally regarded as a harmless nonentity, and the cause of whose disgrace seems a mystery. The three have been in confinement ever

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since, and are so at this present writing. They are kept in a stable, and treated with scant indulgence. They have been degraded from their official positions, and their names of honour have been taken from them by royal edict.

Thus the young king has kicked down the brand-new constitution almost ere its ink was dry. He lives in the open violation of it. He receives petitions at first hand, and sees petitioners face to face without intervention of the council. He holds his ministers in durance by his own personal act, and on his own personal responsibility. The council, which the constitution created, still meets, shorn of two of its members who are in the stable hard by, and not a little nervous lest its numerical strength be yet further reduced, and that of the occupants of the stable be increased. It does nothing-it has done nothing since the king raised his voice, pitched the constitution to the devil, and asserted his grasp of a despotic sceptre that his predecessors have swayed for centuries. The old-established machinery of the Hlwot-dau was used for the promulgation of the royal edict degrading the fallen ministers.

Absolutism, then, has got the upper hand again in Burmah, after a spell of constitutionalism-such as it was-that lasted for little more than three months. The rather limp barons of the Burmese Runnymede misreckoned their own moral force-weakened as that was by a shortcoming in purity of hands and singleness of heartwhen opposed to the will of a king prompted by palace intrigue, and

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supported by the physical strength that is at the disposal of a prescriptively despotic throne. They omitted to note their lack of that moral and, if need be, physical support, furnished by the aspirations of the people, that is the ultimate backbone and solid maintenance of a successful revolutionary reform. They forgot that the Burmese as a nation have not learned to care two damns.' But the seed has been sown, and though it may lie long in the earth, it will infallibly germinate. Meanwhile, in his enjoyment of the reasserted despotism, King Theebo may vie in misgovernment and oppression with King Tharawadi himself. But it is only fair to say that he shows no symptoms of an inclination to abuse his newly-achieved position, and that his advisers within the palace refrain from stimulating him to arbitrary acts. He seems amiable and well-intentioned; only he is absolute, and the constitution is a turned-over page in the history of Burmah, one, surely, of the strangest episodes in all that strange history. It remains to be added that the course of true love has run smooth, and indeed, it may be said, with exceptional volume. The king has been doubly blessed; he has married not only his sweetheart, the second daughter of the first queen, but also her elder sister. The former is said already to henpeck his Majesty, but that is probably a libel. There is some reason, however, to believe that he does writhe under the too effusive interference of a mother-in-law, an infliction who is by no means exclusively of Western prevalence. One of his predecessors, King Noung-daughyi, who was confessedly henpecked into an abyss of abjectness, was wont to seek some compensation in throwing his spear at his courtiers when they put him out. Young Theebo imitates him in this matter, and has pricked several of the more confidential members of the palace party. But this is only 'pretty Fanny's way'-a mere ebullition of genial eccentricity.

ARCHIBALD FORBES.

NOTE.

Calcutta: February 21.

Arriving here from Rangoon, I find a telegram stating that the princes and their relations, incarcerated that the present king's succession should be achieved, have been put to death. The act to European readers seems horrible; but it is in accordance with Burmese precedent, and simply indicates King Theebo's complete and whole-hearted retrogression to the absolute despotism of his predecessors. The reading from it is that the constitution is an utter dead letter, and that Independent Burmah has wholly relapsed-fallen back upon the old lines. It is probable, I think, that we shall hear by-and-by of the execution of all the ministers party to the attempt to limit the despotic prerogative of the sovereign.

A. F.

THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. XXVII.-MAY 1879.

THE NATION BEFORE PARTY.

IN the month of March last I ventured to suggest, in a letter to the newspapers, that it might be possible to form a new party in politics which should embrace the moderate men of both sides. The suggestion was a good deal commented on at the time, being favourably received in some quarters and denounced in others. Of the reception it thus met with-at least so far as the commentary was relevant to the text, which it was with one notable exception-I have no reason to complain. Every one who utters boldly the thought that is in him is pretty sure to expose himself to attack, if the thought emerges in the slightest degree from the region of the accepted commonplace. The wisest men of the world are probably those who refuse to think at all, except according to the dictates of their party, or who, if they do think, take care to conceal their opinions until the time for their promulgation has fully come.

What I desired to do was to call attention to the present state of parties as being a matter of national interest, and one which is becoming more so every day. We are, if not on the eve of a general election, not far removed from it, and the air is already astir with speculations as to what its result will be. But there is still time to pause before the fray begins, and to consider what are the issues to be decided by the electorate, and how far the electorate will have a chance of forming a judgment upon them. It would be too much to expect the professed wire-pullers to care for anything beyond VOL. V.-No. 27.

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carrying the particular candidate whom they have determined to run, and even if they became conscious that their man had moulded his convictions to suit the constituency, instead of suiting the constituency to his convictions, they would no more consent to look out for another than to use a phrase now much in vogue-'to swap horses while crossing the stream.' It is not to these, or such as these, that the following pages are addressed; my appeal is to the much larger mass of the nation who are not enslaved by party ties, and have no personal ends to serve by the ascendency of either of the sections which at present compose the body politic.

In noting the divergencies of existing parties, little is gained by going back to their origin. The terms Cavalier and Roundhead, the Court and the Country Party, Tory and Whig, were really antithetical and mutually repellent when they first came into use, but before the end of the seventeenth century the antithesis had lost nine-tenths of its point. The questions which agitated England in the prerevolution times were mainly questions of dynasty and religion, and have no counterpart at the present moment. No sane man now wishes to change the succession to the Crown, and very few are fanatical enough to suppose that the people as a whole will ever be converted to Roman Catholicism. The divine hereditary and indefeasible right,' 'passive obedience,' 'non-resistance,' and 'popery,' which were the notes of Toryism in the time of the second Charles, have long since disappeared from the programme of practical politics, and each party now professes-in spite of certain recent inconsistencies on which I shall say something hereafter the original characteristics of Whiggism, viz., the authority and independence of Parliament and the power and majesty of the people.' We may go further still. The propositions condemned by the Tory University of Oxford in 1683 as 'destructive of the sacred powers princes, their state and government, and of all human society,' might, with very few exceptions, be framed and glazed in the Carlton Club; for it is no longer denied-except, perhaps, by Lord Beaconsfield—that, if lawful governors become tyrants or govern otherwise than by the law of God and man, they ought to forfeit the right they had unto their government,' or 'that the sovereignty of England is in the three estates of king lords and commons, and that the king has but a co-ordinate power and may be overruled by the other two.' These once extravagant tenets have become articles of our common constitutional creed, and are as freely held by the moderate Conservatives as by the Opposition, although, when the former are called by the older name of Tory, the point of contact is apt to vanish out of sight.

When the Protestant succession was established on a firm basis, and the differences which had given occasion to the formation of the two parties had become reconciled in the manner indicated, their distinctive names, by that law of vis inertia which is characteristic of

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