original mind even to think of,—­the actual working of the governmental system in practice, as distinguished from legal theory.  The result of this novel analysis was startling:  old powers and checks went to the rubbish heap, and a wholly new set of machinery and even new springs of force and life were substituted.  He argued that the actual use of the English monarchy is not to do the work of government, but through its roots in the past to gain popular loyalty and support for the real government, which the masses would not obey if they realized its genuine nature; that “it raises the army though it does not win the battle.”  He showed that the function of the House of Peers is not as a co-ordinate power with the Commons (which is the real government), but as a revising body and an index of the strength of popular feeling.  Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed and care little for speeches which can effect nothing.

Just before ‘Lombard Street’ came his scientific masterpiece, ’Physics and Politics’; a work which does for human society what the ’Origin of Species’ does for organic life, expounding its method of progress from very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones.  Indeed, one of its main lines is only a special application of Darwin’s “natural selection” to societies, noting the survival of the strongest (which implies in the long run the best developed in all virtues that make for social cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much more than that, in spite of its heavy debt to all scientific and institutional research, that it remains a first-rate feat of original constructive thought.  It is the more striking from its almost ludicrous brevity compared with the novelty, variety, and pregnancy of its ideas.  It is scarcely more than a pamphlet; one can read it through in an evening:  yet there is hardly any book which is a master-key to so many historical locks, so useful a standard for referring scattered sociological facts to, so clarifying to the mind in the study of early history.  The work is strewn with fertile and suggestive observations from many branches of knowledge.  Its leading idea of the needs and difficulties of early societies is given in one of the citations.

The unfinished ‘Economic Studies’ are partially a re-survey of the same ground on a more limited scale, and contain in addition a mass of the nicest and shrewdest observations on modern trade and society, full of truth and suggestiveness.  All the other books printed under his name are collections either from the Economist or from outside publications.