Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.  He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope’s maxim that administration is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.  He accepts Harrington’s dictum that the substance of government corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces.  He sees that the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was demonstrated by the failure of George III.  “In all governments,” as he says, “there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,” between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither “can ever absolutely prevail,” shows us rather that we are on the threshold of laissez-faire than that Hume really understood the problem of freedom.  He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government.  He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency to persist in terms of men instead of principles.  He was convinced of the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect on commerce of an absolute government.  He emphasized the value of freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed government of England was maintained.  “It has also been found,” he said in a happy phrase, “... that the people are no such dangerous monsters as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute beasts.”  There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such acuteness may not be found.

Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent.  Hume was a typical child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.  Why people’s religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a road.  Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department of the State lest it should get out of hand.  He was, moreover, a static philosopher, disturbed by signs of political restlessness; and this led to the purgation of Whig doctrines from his writings, and their consistent replacement by a cynical conservatism.  He was always afraid that popular government would mean mob-rule; and absolute government is accordingly recommended as the euthanasia of the British constitution.  Not even the example of Sweden convinced him that a standing army might exist without civil liberty being endangered; and he has all the noxious fallacies of