Whether or not we are on the threshold of great legislative changes, it is in any case certain that the work of government will be carried on under new parliamentary and social conditions.  In meeting this prospect, we have the aid neither of strong and systematic political schools, nor powerful and coherent political parties.  No one can pretend, for instance, that there is any body of theoretic opinion so compact and so well thought out as Benthamism was in its own day and generation.  Again, in practice, there are ominous signs that Parliament is likely to break up into groups; and the substitution of groups for parties is certain, if continental experience is to count for anything, to create new obstacles in the way of firm and stable government.  Weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was.  This was abundantly shown during the last five years by a variety of unfortunate public adventures.  Then, does the excitement of democracy weaken the stability of national temperament?  By setting up what in physics would be called a highly increased molecular activity, does it disturb not merely conservative respect for institutions, but respect for coherence and continuity of opinion and sentiment in the character of the individual himself?  Is there a fluidity of character in modern democratic societies which contrasts not altogether favourably with the strong solid types of old?  Are Englishmen becoming less like Romans, and more like disputatious Greeks?  These and many other considerations of the same kind are enough to secure a ready welcome for any thinker who can light up the obscurities of the time.

With profound respect for Sir Henry Maine’s attainments, and every desire to profit by illumination wherever it may be discerned, we cannot clearly see how the present volume either makes the problems more intelligible, or points the way to feasible solutions.  Though he tries, in perfect good faith, to be the dispassionate student, he often comes very close to the polemics of the hour.  The truth is that scientific lawyers have seldom been very favourable to popular government; and when the scientific lawyer is doubled with the Indian bureaucrat, we are pretty sure beforehand that in such a tribunal it will go hard with democracy.  That the author extremely dislikes and suspects the new order, he does not hide either from himself or us.  Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the forum and the market-place has infected him with a touch of that chagrin which came to men like Tacitus from disbelief In the moral government of a degenerate world.  Though he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable nec amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill concealed.  There are passages where we almost hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.  It was said of Tocqueville