'coxcomb may beget a philosopher,' and, therefore, denies the influence of race. In fact, he has tacitly assumed that all men are of one 'breed.' They are but the abstract manthe metaphysical entity, alike in all times, places, and conditions. The 'breed' being a constant quantity, all differences must arise from 'the manner of rearing,' or, in other words, on form of government. He points out that the character of a given people varies from age to age, and that the English character is strikingly heterogeneous, even in the same country. From his point of view, as excluding any reference to successive stages of development, the first consideration is a decisive proof that differences in character arise from change of government; and, as he excludes reference to variety of breed, the second consideration justifies the inverted conclusion that the character arises from the mixed form of government.

58. I have said enough to illustrate the natural tendency of the method. Hume having abandoned the old theological and metaphysical synthesis, has reduced the race to a mere chaos of unconnected individuals. He cannot recognise, even when they are brought before him, the great forces which bind men together; a nation is not a living organism, but a temporary combination in various conformations of colourless units. National character results from forms of government; forms of government are the work of chance, though chance, as no one knows better, is but a name for undiscovered causes. History, therefore, is, rigidly speaking, an inscrutable enigma. The Essay upon the Rise and Progress of Arts and Sciences' opens with some able remarks on the influence of chance, or 'secret and unknown causes,' upon human affairs, and shows that general results generally depend upon 'determinate and known causes.' He attaches great importance to the influence of individuals. Freedom causes the rise of arts and sciences, and freedom was, perhaps, favoured by the division into small states due to the physical configuration of certain countries; but, after all, we must often trace the character of a people to the rise of some Brutus, at the early period when their imaginations were still plastic, and forms of government unfixed. Even the great movements of thought present them2 Ib. p. 248.

Hume's Works, iii. p. 258.

selves to him as 'accidents.' Religious wars are simple follies, for a controversy about ' an article of faith, which is utterly absurd and unintelligible, is not a difference in sentiment, but in a few phrases and expressions which one party accepts of without understanding, and the other refuses in the same manner.' 'Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon that has yet appeared in human affairs.'2 When such principles involve a 'contrariety of action,' the case is explicable, but he cannot see why men of different religions should not pass each other like travellers going in opposite directions on the same high road. Religious wars, therefore, all depend on the frivolous' principle that people are shocked by a difference of sentiment.

2

59. It is no wonder if history presented itself as a mere undecipherable maze to the eighteenth-century thinkers, of whom Hume is the most complete representative. Ignoring utterly the great forces which move men's souls, unconscious of the differences due to race, climate, or gradual revolution, they saw nothing but a meaningless collection of facts, through which ran no connecting principle. The translation of this heretical scepticism into politics is a cynical conservatism; and Hume, though elaborately candid in his Essays, evidently inclines to the side of authority as the most favourable to that stagnation which is the natural ideal of a sceptic. He anticipates, indeed, some modern writers, in insisting upon the advantages of competition amongst rising states, and points to China as an illustration of the check imposed upon progress by excessive authority. A discontented sceptic worships competition, as a contented sceptic worships calm. But, to Hume, the time for struggling seemed to have elapsed. All elements of disturbance were a mere annoyance to the adult world. We should be above playing with toys, religious and otherwise, which amused our childhood. In his Utopia, the church is a department of the state, and the clergy rigidly bound under secular authority, for they represented a belief in something, and consequently a possibility of fanaticism. We may guess from various indications in his Essays that his 'Hume's Works, iii. p. 130. 2 Ib. p. 130. Ib. p. 183.

ostensible preference for the British Constitution was already tempered by a decided hankering after an enlightened despotism on the French model. His nearest approach to a definite theory is that popular governments suit the infancy and despotisms the age of a civilised state. 'Absolute monarchy,' he says, 'is the easiest death, the true euthanasia of the British Constitution.'1

V. THE FRENCH INFLUENCE.

60. The first half of the eighteenth century had thus produced no English book upon the theory of politics capable of communicating any great impulse to speculation, or of directly affecting the dominant ideas of the time. The English people, waxing fat under a succession of good harvests and the rapid development of commercial enterprise, worried themselves very little about the game played by their governing classes. A growl at some tax upon drink, or at a pacific policy which hurt their national pride, or seemed to endanger their trade, was their only sign of life. Nothing could be further from the mind of the aristocracy than any real attempt to awaken a sleeping democracy. The jargon about standing armies and annual parliaments was the most transparent of artifices. And meanwhile, philosophers, growing ever more sceptical, were pretty clear that where nothing could be known it was. better to make no change. By degrees a new spirit was to awake, but the speculative impulse was not to come from England. About the middle of the century appeared two books, which marked a new era. Montesquieu's 'Esprit des Lois' was published in 1748, and Rousseau's Contrat Social' in 1762. Far asunder in all else as the poles, they. have this much in common, that both are written in French and both show strong marks of English influence. Nothing would be easier than to put together a theory showing why the best books upon English politics must necessarily be written by foreigners. The complex organisation of the English political system can, it may be suggested, be most easily studied from without. To a Frenchman, accustomed to the simplicity of a centralised government, this cumbrous Hume's Works, iii, 126.

mechanism, involving the co-operation of so many heterogeneous elements, and yet working out a fair amount of order,: prosperity, and general success, presented an interesting problem. A correct analysis of its boasted checks and balances might throw some light on the mysteries of political science. An Englishman, on the other hand, accustomed from infancy to the hand-to-mouth expedients of intriguing politicians, had generally a difficulty in conceiving how such things as general political principles existed. A generalisation was unintelligible to him till it was interpreted into the technical language of his own constitutional lawyers. The complexity was too familiar to excite his astonishment, and discouraged any attempt at discovering the vital formula. Trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus Act were national idols, by which British liberty was preserved, and he cared not to ask from what higher power they derived their sanctity. Montesquieu, like many of his countrymen in later years, is the scientific observer, struck by the strange phenomena which were so familiar to Englishmen, and endeavouring to account for them by an ingenious apparatus of philosophical theory. Rousseau represents a very different sentiment. Philosophically, he is the rigid logical observer, simply disgusted by elaborate combinations, which suggest dishonest juggling, and seem to be calculated to bewilder simple lovers of truth in their endless labyrinths. Politically, he is the mouthpiece of that new spirit which was to find a stubborn opposition in the English embodiment of ancient prejudice. Yet England, as the land of popular, though abortive, revolutions, had some lessons for Rousseau. Hobbes, the product of the society which produced the Great Rebellion, and Locke, the mouthpiece of the Whigs of 1688, had laid down principles susceptible of a wide application, and Rousseau owed something to each of them. Any full consideration of either of these great writers would be beyond my task. A brief notice of their relation to English thought is a necessary introduction to a study of our later political literature.

: 61. The true claim of Montesquieu to enduring reputation is generally recognised. He is the founder of the historical method. His writings, it is true, are defaced by many faults. The superficial antitheses, the constant efforts

to dazzle, the trite allusions to classical precedent in the old style of literary coxcombry, obscured the solid merits of his writings, and seemed to his contemporaries in France to justify the familiar phrase of Mme. du Deffand, that his book should be called not 'L'Esprit des Lois,' but 'De l'esprit sur les Lois.' In truth, his grasp of the historical method is by no means assured. He accepts and gives additional emphasis to many of those hasty generalisations which distinguish the merely empirical school from the school which appeals to organised experience. History is still for him a collection of precedents, all of equal value, instead of the record of an evolution. He is content with superficial analogies, instead of detecting laws of growth. He deserves his place, less by reason of any clear results, than by certain tendencies implicitly contained in his arguments. He recognises, though he does not fully develop, the principle of the correlation between forms of government and conditions of climate, soil, and race. He jumps to very hasty conclusions upon those subjects, but he sets an example of accounting for political phenomena by historical research instead of a priori guesses. He announces, almost at starting, the doctrine that the government most conformable to nature is that of which the particular disposition is best related to that of the people upon which it is established1-a saying which should have dispersed many pestilent errors; and his familiar epigram that the English system was found in the woods,' clearly indicates the conclusion that more light is to be thrown upon national constitutions by historical enquiries into the origin of a nation than by abstract theories about states of nature and social contracts. He opens, in short, fertile lines of investigation, though he has not the patience to adhere to his own method.

62. His English admirers, it is said, first taught the French to appreciate the prophet who had gained little honour amongst them. And it was natural that Englishmen should feel some gratitude to a writer who had pronounced so glowing a panegyric on their constitution. The remarkable chapter in which he describes the English system as the

'Esprit des Lois,' book i. ch. iii.

Ib. book xi. ch. vi.

2 Ib. book xi. ch. vi.