government could be stable.”  Nothing can be more true.  When Burke and Chatham and Fox persistently declared that the victory of England over the colonists would prove fatal in the long run to the liberties of England itself, those great men were even wiser than they knew.  The success of popular government across the Atlantic has been the strongest incentive to the extension of popular government here.  We need go no further back than the Reform Bill of 1867 to remind ourselves that the victory of the North over the South, and the extraordinary clemency and good sense with which that victory was used, had more to do with the concession of the franchise to householders in boroughs than all the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and all the diplomacies of Mr. Disraeli.

To the influence of the American Union must be added that of the British colonies.  The success of popular self-government in these thriving communities is reacting on political opinion at home with a force that no statesman neglects, and that is every day increasing.  There is even a danger that the influence may go too far.  They are solving some of our problems, but not under our conditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties.  Still the effect of colonial prosperity—­a prosperity alike of admirable achievement and boundless promise—­is irresistible.  It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most eloquent assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, save practical experience carefully observed and rationally interpreted.  This native and independent rationality in men is what the jealous votary of the historic method places far too low.

In coming closer to the main current of the book, our first disappointment is that Sir Henry Maine has not been very careful to do full justice to the views that he criticises.  He is not altogether above lending himself to the hearsay of the partisan.  He allows expressions to slip from him which show that he has not been anxious to face the problems of popular government as popular government is understood by those who have best right to speak for it.  “The more the difficulties of multitudinous government are probed,” he says (p. 180), “the stronger grows the doubt of the infallibility of popularly elected legislatures.”  We do not profess to answer for all that may have been said by Mr. Bancroft, or Walt Whitman, or all the orators of all the Fourths of July since American Independence.  But we are not acquainted with any English writer or politician of the very slightest consideration or responsibility who has committed himself to the astounding proposition, that popularly elected legislatures are infallible.  Who has ever advanced such a doctrine?  Further, “It requires some attention to facts to see how widely spread is the misgiving as to the absolute