example, read through the second volume of the excellent work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu on the Empire of the Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain that democracy is more difficult than autocracy?  It would be interesting, too, to know whether the Prince on whose shoulders will one day be laid the burden of the German Empire will read the dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties of democracy with acquiescence.  There are many questions, of which the terms are no sooner stated than we at once see that a certain and definite answer to them is impossible.  The controversy as to the relative fragility, or the relative difficulty, of popular government and other forms of government, appears to be a controversy of this kind.  We cannot decide it until we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a great mass of heterogeneous facts; and then, supposing the process to have been ever so skilfully and laboriously performed, no proposition could be established as the outcome, that would be an adequate reward for the pains of the operation.

This, we venture to think, must be pronounced a grave drawback to the value of the author’s present speculation.  He attaches an altogether excessive and unscientific importance to form.  It would be unreasonable to deny to a writer on democracy as a form of government the right of isolating his phenomenon.  But it is much more unreasonable to predicate fragility, difficulty, or anything else of a particular form of government, without reference to other conditions which happen to go along with it in a given society at a given time.  None of the properties of popular government are independent of surrounding circumstances, social, economic, religious, and historic.  All the conditions are bound up together in a closely interdependent connection, and are not secondary to, or derivative from, the mere form of government.  It is, if not impossible, at least highly unsafe to draw inferences about forms of government in universals.

No writer seems to us to approach Machiavelli in the acuteness with which he pushes behind mere political names, and passes on to the real differences that may exist in movements and institutions that are covered by the same designation.  Nothing in its own way can be more admirable, for instance, than his reflections on the differences between democracy at Florence and democracy in old Rome—­how the first began in great inequality of conditions, and ended in great equality, while the process was reversed in the second; how at Rome the people and the nobles shared power and office, while at Florence the victors crushed and ruined their adversaries; how at Rome the people, by common service with the nobles, acquired some of their virtues, while at Florence the nobles were forced down to seem, as well as to be, like the common people (Istorie Fiorentine, bk. iii).