4. The Parliamentary Method.
The political policy of Socialism presents many difficult problems which are not the same in any two countries, and which are more complicated in Great Britain than in any other land of the globe.
A comparison between German political conditions and our own will enable me to make this clear. The German Reichstag is not a parliament. When Bismarck drafted the constitution, which with but few amendments was accepted for the German Empire, he had two leading purposes in his mind. He determined to create a legislature based on the most democratic franchise, but devoid of every particle of real power, and at the same time to repose the real legislative and executive authority of the confederation in a Bundesrath which was to be so constituted as to be a fortress of the most extreme kind of conservatism. The Reichstag is therefore little more than a debating society, wherein, however, serious affairs of state are discussed and public opinion expressed in such a way that the responsible authorities cannot afford to overlook it. It has been described as the weakest lower house of parliament in the world, whilst the Bundesrath has been described as the strongest upper house. If there were to be a redistribution of seats and the towns were adequately represented, the flood of Radical and Socialist representation that would follow would swamp the Bismarck constitution. But I am not dealing with the
