As for our own country, and those whom the multitude permits to lead it, we cannot forget that by far the most popular and powerful man in faece Romuli—­as Sir Henry Maine insists on our putting it in that polite way—­was tried and condemned not many years ago for publishing a certain pamphlet which made a limitation of population the very starting-point of social reform.  It is not necessary to pronounce an opinion on the particular counsels of the pamphlet, but the motives which prompted its circulation (motives admitted to be respectable by the Chief-Justice who tried the case), and the extraordinary reception of the pamphlet by the serious portion of the workmen of the towns, would make a careful writer think twice before feeling sure that popular bodies will never listen to the truth about population.  No doubt, as Sir Henry Maine says in the same place, certain classes now resist schemes for relieving distress by emigration.  But there is a pretty obvious reason for that.  That reason is not mere aversion to face the common sense of the relations between population and subsistence, but a growing suspicion—­as to the reasonableness of which, again, I give no opinion—­that emigration is made into an easy and slovenly substitute for a scientific reform in our system of holding and using land.  In the case of Ireland, other political considerations must be added.

Democracy will be against science, we admit, in one contingency:  if it loses the battle with the Ultramontane Church.  The worst enemy of science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, c’est le clericalisme.  The interests of science and the interests of democracy are one.  Let us take a case.  Suppose that popular Government in France were to succumb, a military or any other more popular Government would be forced to lean on Ultramontanes.  Ultramontanes would gather the spoils of democratic defeat.  Sir Henry Maine is much too well informed to think that a clerical triumph would be good for science, whatever else it might be good for.  Then are not propositions about democracy being against science very idle and a little untrue?  “Modern politics,” said a wise man (Pattison, Sermons, p. 191) “resolve themselves into the struggle between knowledge and tradition.”  Democracy is hardly on the side of tradition.

We have dwelt on these secondary matters, because they show that the author hardly brings to the study of modern democracy the ripe preparation of detail which he gave to ancient law.  In the larger field of his speculation, the value of his thought is seriously impaired by the absence of anything like a philosophy of society as a whole.  Nobody who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill—­I am not sure whether we should not add even De Maistre—­can imagine any of them as setting to work on a general political speculation without reference to particular social conditions.  They would have conducted the inquiry in strict relation to the stage at which a