This is only an example of the distinctions and qualifications which it is necessary to introduce before we can prudently affirm or deny anything about political institutions in general terms.  Who would deny that both the stability and the degree of difficulty of popular government are closely connected in the United States with the abundance of accessible land?  Who would deny that in Great Britain they are closely connected with the greater or less prosperity of our commerce and manufactures?  To take another kind of illustration from Mr. Dicey’s brilliant and instructive volume on the Law of the Constitution.  The governments of England and of France are both of them popular in form; but does not a fundamental difference in their whole spirit and working result from the existence in one country of the droit administratif, and the absolute predominance in the other of regular law, applied by the ordinary courts, and extending equally over all classes of citizens?  Distinctions and differences of this order go for nothing in the pages before us; yet they are vital to the discussion.

The same fallacious limitation, the same exclusion of the many various causes that cooperate in the production of political results, is to be discerned in nearly every argument.  The author justly calls attention to the extraordinary good luck which has befallen us as a nation.  He proceeds to warn us that if the desire for legislative innovation be allowed to grow upon us at its present pace—­pace assumed to be very headlong indeed—­the chances are that our luck will not last.  We shall have a disaster like Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151).  This is a curiously narrow reading of contemporary history.  Did Austria lose Sadowa, or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan, in consequence of the passion of either of those Governments for legislative innovations; or must we not rather, in order to explain these striking events, look to a large array of military, geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic considerations and conditions?  If so, what becomes of the moral?  England is, no doubt, the one great civilised power that has escaped an organic or structural change within the last five-and-twenty years.  Within that period, the American Union, after a tremendous war, has revolutionised the social institutions of the South, and reconstructed the constitution.  The French Empire has foundered, and a French Republic once more bears the fortunes of a great State over troubled waters.  Germany has undergone a complete transformation; so has the Italian peninsula.  The internal and the external relations alike of the Austrian Power are utterly different to-day from what they were twenty years ago.  Spain has passed from monarchy to republic, and back to monarchy again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty.  But what share had legislative innovation in producing these great changes?  No share at all in any one case.  What is the logic, then, of the warning that if we persist in our taste for legislative innovation, we shall lose our immunity from the violent changes that have overtaken other States—­changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?