GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 77, 2 April 1910, Page 14

GOOD CITIZENSHIP.

AND SOME HINDRANCES. -In the course of three lectures given at Yale University, Mr. Bryce elaborates the three main causes of bad citizenship, reports the Argonaut. They are Indolence, Selfish Personal Interest-, and Party Spirit. Tho first, he says, is tho most common; the second, the most noxious; and the third, the most excusable. Passing on to a summary of the possible remedies, he puts upon one side are too largo for discussion the political theories of Philosophical Anarchism and Socialism, which are not so much remedies as a change in the whole fabric of government. Enumerating the minor remedial expedients he gives the place of honour to Proportional Representation as calculated to quicken the pulses of public life. English experiments in this direction, he tells us, havo been dropped, the method still in use in Illinois has not given much satisfaction, while on the other hand the scheme has worked well in Belgium and Switzerland. It is these same two countries that have apparently succeeded in a plan for Obligatory Voting which is out of the question in both America and England. It would certainly seem that small civic value can be attached to the vote cast sub paena. It is to Switzerland, too, that we must go for experience of the Initiative and the Referendum and Swiss testimony seems opposed to the former and favourable to the latter. But the conditions in Switzerland are so different from those elsewhere that the evidence has but little value. The evil of Personal Interest is, as Mr. Bryce hays, the most noxious and only to be overcome by vigilaiice. He speaks of the danger of passing laws ''which influential gi-onps of wealthy men may have a personal interest in promot- , ing or resisting." Mr. Bryce has little to say on the subject of the Primaries, i as political parties are not recognised by European law, and no such problem exists in Europe. But the crux of the whole problem is to overcome the original Adam in man. We must reach the will through the soul. There must be an ethical and a civic education of the voter, a task which Switzerland alone of the European nations has undertaken. It is not enough to teach children to wave the flag unless they learn also to consider tho communal rather (har» thb perhuual Interest at the polling booth. All efforts at political improvement resolve themselves ultimately into the ethical status of the voter, and it is to the improvement of the ethical status that the best efforts must be directed.