This rift in the essence of constitutional monarchy is irremediable. Here actual and conceptual, work and critique, are frontally opposed, and it is their mutual attrition that constitutes what the average educated man calls internal politics. Apart from the cases of Prussia-Germany and Austria — where constitutions did come into existence at first,[1] but in the presence of the older political traditions were never very influential — it was only in England that the practice of government kept itself homogeneous. Here, race held its own against principle. Men had more than an inkling that real politics, politics aiming at historical success, is a matter of training and not of shaping. This was no aristocratic prejudice, but a cosmic fact that emerges much more distinctly in the experience of any English racehorse-trainer than in all the philosophical systems in the world. Shaping can refine training, but not replace it. And thus the higher society of England, Eton and Balliol, became training-trounds where politicians were worked up with a consistent sureness the like of which is only to be found in the training of the Prussian officer-corps — trained, that is, as connoisseurs and masters of the underlying pulse of things (not excluding the hidden course of opinions and ideas). Thus prepared, they were able, in the great flood of bourgeois-revolutionary principles that swept over the years after 1832, to preserve and control the being-stream which they directed. They possessed "training," the suppleness and collectedness of the rider who, with a good horse under him, feels victory coming nearer and nearer. They allowed the great principles to move the mass because they knew well that it is money that is the "wherewithal" by which motion is imparted to these great principles, and they substituted, for the brutal methods of the eighteenth century, methods more refined and not less effective — one of the simpler of these being to threaten their opponents with the cost of a new election. The doctrinaire constitutions of the Continent saw only the one side of the fact democracy. Here, where there was no constitution, but men were in "condition," it was seen as a whole.
A vague feeling of all this was never quite lost on the Continent. For the absolute State of the Baroque there had been a perfectly clear form, but for "constitutional monarchy" there were only unsteady compromises, and Conservative and Liberal parties were distinguished — not, as in England after Canning, by the possession of different but well-tested modes of government, applied turn-and-turn-about to the actual work of governing — but according to the direction in which they respectively desired to alter the constitution — namely, towards tradition or towards theory. Should the Parliament serve the Dynasty, or vice versa? — that was the bone of contention, and in disputing over it it was forgotten that foreign policy was the final aim. The "Spanish" and the misnamed "English" sides of a constitution would not and could not grow together, and thus it befell that during the nineteenth century the diplo-
- ↑ Early, that is, in the post-revolutionary era here considered. — Tr.
