and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people.”  Nay, experience perhaps justifies him in going further.  When popular discontents are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss in the constitution or the administration.  “The people have no interest in disorder.  When they go wrong, it is their error, and not their crime.”  And then he quotes the famous passage from the Memoirs of Sully, which both practical politicians and political students should bind about their necks, and write upon the tables of their hearts:—­“The revolutions that come to pass in great states are not the result of chance, nor of popular caprice....  As for the populace, it is never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but from impatience of suffering.”

What really gives its distinction to the Present Discontents is not its plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for the superiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the presence in it of the thought of Montesquieu and his school, of the necessity of studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of government and law, but in relation to whole groups of social facts which give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable.  Connected with this, is a particularly wide interpretation and a particularly impressive application of the maxims of expediency, because a wide conception of the various interacting elements of a society naturally extends the considerations which a balance of expediencies will include.  Hence, in time, there came a strong and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his breadth of vision, his flexibility of temper, his hardly measurable influence.  These are the principal thoughts in the Discontents to which that tract owes its permanent interest.  “Whatever original energy,” says Burke, in one place, “may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operation of both is in truth merely instrumental.  Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it....  The laws reach but a very little way.  Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.  Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them.  Without them, your Commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective constitution.”  Thus early in his public career had Burke seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured in the long and ever memorable episode of his war against the French Revolution:  the opposition between artificial arrangements in politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by what he calls elsewhere in the present tract the natural strength