ABSTRACT
Party government, as Cecil Chesterton truly points out in his History of the United States, 132 is only tolerable when the two parties agree in their political opinions. Whether socialism be a good thing or a bad thing, there can be no doubt that we must make up our minds either to have it or not to have it. We cannot have socialism for five years; then return to private enterprise for five years, then go back again to socialism and so on. Now this condition of substantial agreement between the parties was admirably fulfilled in the England of the 1830’s and 1840’s. Wellington and Melbourne, Peel and Lord John Russell—all were most obedient servants of the laws of political economy, and it was a matter of indifference to the masters of those laws which of them might chance to be in nominal power.
