We are entirely sceptical as to the proposition that “men have at all times quarrelled more fiercely about phrases and formulas than even about material interests” (p. 124).  There has been a certain amount of fighting in the world about mere words, as idle as the faction fights between Caravats and Shanavests, or Two-Year-Olds and Three-Year-Olds in Ireland.  But the more carefully we look into human history, the more apparent it becomes that underneath the phrase or the formula there is usually a material or a quasi-material, or a political, or a national, or an ecclesiastical interest.  Few quarrels now seem so purely verbal as those which for several centuries raged about the mysteries of the faith in the Western and the Eastern Churches.  Yet these quarrels, apparently as frivolous as they were ferocious, about the relations of mind and matter, about the composition of the Trinity, about the Divine nature, turned much less on futile metaphysics than on the solid competition for ecclesiastical power, or the conflict of rival nationalities.  The most transcendental heresy or orthodoxy generally had business at the bottom of it.

In limiting the parentage of Modern English Liberalism of a Radical or democratic type to Rousseau and Bentham, the author has left out of sight what is assuredly a much more important factor than any speculative, literary, or philosophic matter whatever.  “Englishmen,” he says truly, “are wont to be content with the rough rule of success or failure as the test of right or wrong in national undertakings.”  The same habit of mind and temper marks the attitude of Englishmen towards their national institutions.  They look to success and failure, they take the measure of things from results, they consult the practical working of the machine, they will only go to school with experience.  We cannot find the proof that a priori Radicalism ever at any time got a real hold of any considerable mass of the people of this country, or that any of the great innovations in domestic policy since the end of Lord Liverpool’s administration have been inspired or guided by Rousseauite assumptions.  Godwin, whose book on Political Justice was for a long time the great literary fountain of English Radicalism, owed quite as much to the utilitarian Helvetius as to the sentimental Rousseau.  Nor can either William Cobbett or Joseph Hume be said to have dealt largely in a priori.  What makes the Radical of the street is mostly mother-wit exercising itself upon the facts of the time.  His weakness is that he does not know enough of the facts of other times.

Sir Henry Maine himself points to what has had a far more decisive influence on English ways of thinking about politics than his two philosophers, put together.  “The American Republic,” he says (p. 11), “has greatly influenced the favour into which popular government grew.  It disproved the once universal assumptions that no Republic could govern a large territory, and that no strictly Republican