[Footnote 1:  Rousseau, chap. xii.]

One more word may be said by the way.  The very slightest account of Rousseau is too slight to be tolerable, if it omits to mention Calvin.  Rousseau’s whole theory of the Legislator, which produced such striking results in certain transitory phases of the French Revolution, grew up in his mind from the constitution which the great reformer had so predominant a share in framing for the little republic where Rousseau was born.

This omission of Locke and Calvin again exemplifies the author’s characteristic tendency to look upon political ideas as if speculative writers got them out of their own heads, or out of the heads of other people, apart from the suggestions of events and the requirements of circumstance, Calvin was the builder of a working government, and Locke was the defender of a practical revolution.

Nor does the error stop at the literary sources of political theories.  A point more or less in an estimate of a writer or a book is of trivial importance compared with what strikes us as Sir Henry Maine’s tendency to impute an unreal influence to writers and books altogether.  There is, no doubt, a vulgar and superficial opinion that mere speculation is so remote from the real interests of men, that it is a waste of time for practical people to concern themselves about speculation.  No view could be more foolish, save one; and that one is the opposite view, that the real interests of men have no influence on their speculative opinions, and no share either in moulding those opinions or in causing their adoption.  Sir Henry Maine does not push things quite so far as this.  Still he appears to us to attribute almost exclusive influence to political theories, and almost entirely to omit what we take to be the much more important reaction upon theory, both of human nature, and of the experience of human life and outward affairs.  He makes no allowance among innovating agencies for native rationalism without a formula.  His brilliant success in other applications of the Historic Method has disposed him to see survivals where other observers will be content with simpler explanations.  The reader is sometimes tempted to recall Edie Ochiltree’s rude interruption of Mr. Oldbuck’s enthusiasm over the praetorium of the Immortal Roman camp at Monkbarns.  “Praetorian here, Praetorian there!  I mind the bigging o ’t!”

Sir Henry Maine believes that the air is thick with ideas about democracy that were conceived a priori, and that sprung from the teaching of Rousseau.  A conviction of the advantages of legislative change, for example, he considers to owe its origin much less to active and original intelligence, than to “the remote effect of words and notions derived from broken-down political theories.”  There are two great fountains of political theory in our country according to the author:  Rousseau is one, and Bentham is the other.  Current thought and speech Is infested