Sir George Cornewall Lewis was an eminently English statesman, fully aware of the necessity of mutual concession--more willing than most to be guided as a Minister by the tradition of his office, to leave the administration for which he must answer in Parliament to the practical experience of his permanent subordinates--but one whom, assuredly, no one ever accused of undue pliancy, or excessive deference to party or popular feeling.
Mr. Bagehot alone of the three was a man likely, _coeteris paribus,_ to prefer the winning side; to believe that the belief of the many was likely to be right; looking, however, to the opinion of the many educated and thoughtful rather than of the many ignorant and over-occupied. Yet all agree at once in treating the coming rule of numbers almost as a law of nature, which it were folly to criticize and madness to resist; and in anticipating its advent with doubt and distrust, with deep and sometimes gloomy apprehension. Their constant, thoughtful concurrence in both convictions, their equal assurance that pure Democracy was dangerous and that it was inevitable, deserves a profound significance from their utterly distinct points of view; from the utter unlikeness of their tempers, their experience, and their natural bias.
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, as a Liberal politician, was decidedly distrustful of electoral reform, and accepted it only as a party necessity. His personal delight in the exposure of popular errors, his insistence on the value of authority, and the immense extent of the sphere in which the thought and conduct of the many are necessarily controlled by the authority of the few, the spirit of such books as his 'Essay on the Government of Dependencies' are those of a mind wholly adverse to democratic theories, and intensely mistrustful of popular judgments. He was not fascinated by what he describes as 'the splendid _vision_ of a community bound together by the ties of fraternity, liberty, and equality, exempt from hereditary privilege, giving all things to merit, and presided over by a government in which all the national interests are faithfully represented.' He put these words into the mouth of the advocate of Democracy in his 'Dialogue on the best form of Government,' which he published shortly before his death. In this work his own views are expressed in the person of Crito.