principles you please, you will find its operation checked and stopped at a certain point. In the British constitution there is a perpetual treaty and compromise going on, sometimes openly, sometimes with less observation." (Appeal from the new to the old Whigs, iii., 109, 110.)

In the same spirit he taught that there was no manufacturing a constitution to order, that there must be a congruity between a state and a people, that a government abstractly good, with the most cunningly contrived checks and balances, but not suited to a people, is a bad and will prove an unstable government. So also a government or constitution has no self-preserving power. The conserving forces are religion, that is, an established church, aristocracy and the interests of property, together with good political habits and those sentiments, such as reverence for ancestors, allegiance, attachment to old institutions, which rest on historical recollections. "The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our fathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reverence to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those which may possibly be made hereafter will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent authority and example." (Reflections on Fr. Rev., ii., 305.)

rev. on theories.

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any

Since the French revolution, which Rousseau's doctrines Infl. of French helped on more than all other causes, except the great crying grievances of bad institutions, there has been a reaction in the world from theory, and especially from the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and their right to change the constitution, which under proper limitations is the only true theory and will continue to the end of the world to be the practice. Burke's practical politi

cal maxims were, if not suggested, at least enforced by that event. To Le Maistre we have already called attention. Von Haller's views are entitled to a brief notice. He holds that there is no such thing as state rights; all rights are private rights. Thus the powers wielded by the heads of German principalities were private; they had an absolute right, which could not be taken away but descended by the private right of inheritance. You would suppose that the people must be in a sad case. But no! all their rights are private also, and cannot be taken from them by their rulers. The public powers, like taxation, public roads, and the like, are derived from a multitude of contracts, as if to borrow the illustration of another-Rousseau's great ingot was melted into small coins. The people as well as the prince, if invaded, have a right to resistance after the barons' fashion in the middle ages. As for the rulers, their original title was the right of the strongest, but actual possession brings right with it. The object for which the theory was constructed was to keep things as they are. But even this is not attained. What is to prevent the right of the stronger which existed one year, from being overthrown the next by one stronger still.

The restoration of the Bourbons to monarchy in France, with the subsequent transfer of the government to Louis Phillippe and his line, was attended with the formation or modification of certain political theories by some of the first men of France, such as R. Collard and Guizot. The doctrines of this school are chiefly practical, so far as they are distinctive. They may be compared with Burke's views, as indicating an intention to modify theory by historical considerations. concern.

With their practical side we have now no direct The legitimacy of a government on their theory consisted in its being the reign of reason, justice and right. But as most governments, if you look at their origin, are founded in might not in right, it is not the origin of actual governments which gives them a just title to exist but the

* See F. V. Raumer, über die geschichtl. Entwickelung, etc., pp. 188-197.

fact that they are now just governments. To this is to be added the fact that they have endured for a considerable time. Just as legal titles after a certain length of undisturbed possession are regarded as valid, so is it in the case of public right. In this way they reached a historical ground for an existing government, but they fell into a difficulty on their own theory, when the July revolution of 1830 brought Louis Phillippe and his line to the throne. What was his title, according to the very men of whom some entered into office under him? Nothing more than a sort of quasi legitimacy, weak at first, but increasing in strength every year. He was king not because, being a Bourbon, he had a right to the throne, for there were others with a better title, if succession by inheritance gave a title, but because it was expedient for the public peace that a member of that family should be called to the throne in preference to all others. Or in other words, if the revolution was to take the course which would satisfy the greatest number of Frenchmen and make the least break between the present and the past, what they did might be justified, at least as regards giving the revolution. this particular course. But the question was one at this point with which theory had little to do. If they could have got upon the English ground of a contract between king and people, the breach of which would justify both the deposition of the king by an act of the nation and the readjustment of the supreme authority, that would have been apprehensible. Such a theory would have based the monarchy really upon the consent of the nation while it rendered the attempts of the disaffected to overthrow the state very difficult, but so far as I am aware they did not incline to take that position. But there was truth in their doctrine. Length of time implies consent of the nation and also intertwines constitution. and laws in various ways with the habits of thinking and acting, to such a degree as to make a change without the gravest cause hazardous, and to render settled order afterwards extremely difficult. But it ought to be remembered that time is fruitful of great though often unperceived changes in ideas,

and in the relation of classes. To take account of such ideas and changes is what leaders of nations have never done, perhaps never will do. And so when time knocks at the door with a long account in his hand, he finds those who should have been ready for him perplexed and helpless.

CHAPTER II.

THEORIES TOUCHING THE STATE EXAMINED.

Criticism of some of the theories re

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THE speculations of which we have given an outline are chiefly concerned with the right of the state to specting the state. exist, with the origin and extent of its powers, with its relation to the individuals within its borders, and its rights to jurisdiction within a territory which somehow or other came to belong to a certain body politic, rather than to any other. No one has doubted that state organizations are a necessary part of the system which provides for the order, progress, and elevation of mankind: yet it is not enough to know that states fulfilling what seems to human reason to be their end, exist, but the question is still asked by what right came they to start into being, and who gave them their powers? No one, again, can well doubt that the family was prior, in tine, to the clan or tribe-whatever the extent may have been of the original family-and the clan or tribe to the state; but the matter of fact revealed by history has not been the point of chief interest; the speculations run back to the right of the state to exist and to hold power, to a question of ethics and of politics, and not of history. Nor, further, can we doubt that a multitude of historical causes acting, it may be, through ages, have determined the extent of territory where each state should do its appropriate work; but the very important inquiry, how came a state to be where, and as large or small as it is, has been shoved into the background for the most part, in order to give room to the question, "What was the process by which the people scattered over a certain part of the earth's surface came together at some remote period to organize a state within certain territorial limits?"

These speculations may, however, take the shape of juristic