the ministers and write what is only thought elsewhere.  England is the freest country in the world; I do not except any republic.”  He returned to France so smitten with the parliamentary or moderate form of government, as he called it, that he seemed sometimes to forget the prudent maxim of the Lettres persanes.  “It is true,” said the Parsee Usbeck, “that, in consequence of a whimsicality (bizarrerie) which springs rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws; but the case is rare, and, when it occurs, it should not be touched save with a trembling hand.”

On returning to his castle of La Brede after so many and such long travels, Montesquieu resolved to restore his tone by intercourse with the past.  “I confess my liking for the ancients,” he used to say; “this antiquity enchants me, and I am always ready to say with Pliny, ’You are going to Athens; revere the gods.’” It was not, however, on the Greeks that he concentrated the working of his mind; in 1734, he published his Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la decadence des Romaine.  Montesquieu did not, as Bossuet did, seek to hit upon God’s plan touching the destinies of mankind; he discovers in the virtues and vices of the Romans themselves the secret of their triumphs and of their reverses.  The contemplation of antiquity inspires him with language often worthy of Tacitus, curt, nervous, powerful in its grave simplicity.  “It seemed,” he says, “that the Romans only conquered in order to give; but they remained so positively the masters that, when they made war on any prince, they crushed him, so to speak, with the weight of the whole universe.”

Montesquieu thus performed the prelude to the great work of his life; he had been working for twenty years at the Esprit des lois, when he published it in 1748.  “In the course of twenty years,” he says, “I saw my work begin, grow, progress, and end.”  He had placed as the motto to his book this Latin phrase, which at first excited the curiosity of readers:  Prolem sine matre creatam (Offspring begotten without a mother).  “Young man,” said Montesquieu, by this time advanced in years, to M. Suard (afterwards perpetual secretary to the French Academy), “young man, when a notable book is written, genius is its father, and liberty its mother; that is why I wrote upon the title-page of my work, “Prolem sine matre creatam.”

It was liberty at the same time as justice that Montesquieu sought and claimed in his profound researches into the laws which have from time immemorial governed mankind; that new instinctive idea of natural rights, those new yearnings which were beginning to dawn in all hearts, remained as yet, for the most part, upon the surface of their minds and of their lives; what was demanded at that time in France was liberty to speak and write rather than to act and govern.  Montesquieu, on the contrary, went to the bottom