by the floating fragments of these two systems—­by loose phrases, by vague notions, by superstitions, that enervate the human intellect and endanger social safety.  This is the constant refrain of the pages before us.  We should have liked better evidence.  We do not believe that it is a Roman praetorium.  Men often pick up old phrases for new events, even when they are judging events afresh with independent minds.  When a politician of the day speaks of natural rights, he uses a loose traditional expression for a view of social equities which has come to him, not from a book, but from a survey of certain existing social facts.  Now the phrase, the literary description, is the least significant part of the matter.  When Mr. Mill talks of the influence of Bentham’s writings, he is careful to tell us that he does not mean that they caused the Reform Bill or the Appropriation Clause.  “The changes which have been made,” says Mill, “and the greater changes which will be made, in our institutions are not the work of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts of large portions of society recently grown into strength” (Dissertations, i. 332).  That is the point.  It is the action of these interests and instincts which Sir Henry Maine habitually overlooks.  For is the omission a mere speculative imperfection.  It has an important bearing on the whole practical drift of the book.  If he had made more room for “the common intellect rough-hewing political truths at the suggestion of common wants and common experience,” he would have viewed existing circumstances with a less lively apprehension.

It is easy to find an apposite illustration of what is meant by saying that this talk of the influence of speculation is enormously exaggerated and misleading.  When Arthur Young was in France in the autumn of 1787, he noticed a remarkable revolution in manners in two or three important respects.  One of them was a new fashion that had just come in, of spending some weeks in the country:  everybody who had a country seat went to live there, and such as had none went to visit those who had.  This new custom, observed the admirable Young, is one of the best that they have taken from England, and “its introduction was effected the easier being assisted by the magic of Rousseau’s writings.”  The other and more generally known change was that women of the first fashion were no longer ashamed of nursing their own children, and that infants were no longer tightly bound round by barbarous stays and swaddling clothes.  This wholesome change, too, was assisted by Rousseau’s eloquent pleas for simplicity and the life natural.  Of these particular results of his teaching in France a hundred years ago the evidence is ample, direct, and beyond denial.  But whenever we find gentlemen with a taste for country life, and ladies with a fancy for nursing their own children, we surely need not cry out that here is another proof of the extraordinary influence of the speculations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  We need not treat it as a survival of a broken-down theory.  “Great Nature is more wise than I,” says the Poet.  Great Nature had much more to do with moulding men and women to these things than all the books that have ever been printed.