English writers and statesmen having always enjoyed the power of applying their minds to actual circumstances, and of appealing through a free press and free speech also to the public of their day, have never addressed themselves, as French philosophers did, to the cultivation of abstract speculations and general theories.  Here and there a writer has been thrown, by his individual tastes and turn of thought, upon the study of political philosophy; but the Englishman, taken as a public writer, commonly addresses himself to practical legislation rather than to recondite studies or logical analysis and investigation of the relations between mankind and their regulations under authorised powers.  Since Lord Bacon there have been few, excepting in our later times Mill, Bentham, and his disciples, who have explored the metaphysics of jurisprudence and moral science in England.  Hume dealt in the philosophic treatment of political subjects, but did not work them up into anything like a coherent system.  English are not fond of generalities, but get on by their instincts, bit by bit, as need arises.

Alexis thinks that the writers of the period antecedent to the revolution of 1789 were quite as much thrown up by the condition of public sentiment as they were the exciters of it.  Nothing comprehensive, in matters of social arrangement, can be effected under a state of things like that of England; so easy there for a peculiar grievance to get heard, so easy for a local or class interest to obtain redress against any form of injustice, that legislation must be ‘patching.’  Next to impossible to reorganise a community without a revolution.

Alexis has been at work for about a year in rummaging amid archives, partly in those of the capital, partly in those of the Touraine.  In this last town a complete collection is contained of the records of the old ‘Intendance,’ under which several provinces were governed.  Nothing short of a continuous and laborious poring over the details of Government furnished by these invaluable paperasses could possibly enable a student of the past century to frame to himself any clear conception of the working of the social relations and authorities in old France.  There exists no such tableau.  The manners of the higher classes and their daily life and habits are well portrayed in heaps of memoirs, and even pretty well understood by our contemporaries.  But the whole structure of society, in its relations with the authorised agents of supreme power, including the pressure of those secondary obligations arising out of coutumes du pays, is so little understood as to be scarcely available to a general comprehension of the old French world before 1789.