community happened to be, in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government.  So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir Henry Maine to do.  It is obvious that systems of government, called by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according to the variety of social circumstances around them.  Yet it is here inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen Presidents of the Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile.  If England and Bolivia were at all akin in history, religion, race, industry, the fate of Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive to English Premiers.

One of the propositions which Sir Henry Maine is most anxious to bring home to his readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form to which it tends, is of all kinds of government by far the most difficult.  He even goes so far as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to Democracies some portion of the advantage which Bentham claimed for them, and “putting this advantage at the highest, it is more than compensated by one great disadvantage,” namely, its difficulty.  This generalisation is repeated with an emphasis that surprises us, for two reasons.  In the first place, if the proposition could be proved to be true, we fail to see that it would be particularly effective in its practical bearings.  Everybody whose opinions are worth consideration, and everybody who has ever come near the machinery of democratic government, is only too well aware that whether it be far the most difficult form of government or not, it is certainly difficult enough to tax the powers of statesmanship to the very uttermost.  Is not that enough?  Is anything gained by pressing us further than that?  “Better be a poor fisherman,” said Danton as he walked in the last hours of his life on the banks of the Aube, “better be a poor fisherman, than meddle with the governing of men.”  We wonder whether there has been a single democratic leader either in France or England who has not incessantly felt the full force of Danton’s ejaculation.  There may, indeed, be simpletons in the political world who dream that if only the system of government were made still more popular, all would be plain sailing.  But then Sir Henry Maine is not the man to write for simpletons.

The first reason, then, for surprise at the immense stress laid by the author on the proposition about the difficulty of popular government is that it would not be of the first order of importance if it were true.  Our second reason is that it cannot be shown to be true.  You cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse systems of government.  Governments are things of far too great complexity for precise quantification of this sort.  Will anybody, for