The Future of the Party System

IN the very interesting Romanes lecture delivered last May Mr. G. M. Trevelyan has given a brief survey of the party system during the first two centuries of its existence and before its operation was complicated by the rise of a third party. Mr. Trevelyan writes as an historian rather than as a sociologist and he is consequently more occupied with particulars than with generalities. The origin of the party system he finds in the necessities of Cabinet and Parliamentary government as this developed after the Restoration. But the maintenance of the system he appears inclined to attribute, more than to anything else, to religion or rather religious connexion, to the division that he sums up in the antithesis of Church and Chapel. At the same time he considers that other factors, economic, social, cultural, exercised in shaping the system a varied influence that might be the subject of profitable investigation and provide material for chapters still unwritten of the national history ; till this work has been done an adequate understanding of the party system as it operated during the period surveyed appears to him unattainable.