What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this effect:  That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience, utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer, considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on institutions than institutions depend upon it.  If I were pressed for an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the negro slaves.  However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought.  It is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one another.

To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most perfect and most important literary version.  How have I described Rousseau’s Social Contract?  It placed, I said, the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them.  It substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law.  It overlooked the crucial difficulty—­namely, how to summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken many generations to erect.  Its method was geometric instead of being historic, and hence its “desperate absurdity.”  Its whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society.  It ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces.  It “gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government.”