his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy’s Island Pharisees sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention to the evils of his time.  It describes undoubted facts, and it shows that the era of content has gone.  But its careful periods and strangely far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his questions.  Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy.  He sees that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted.  Nothing could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke’s Present Discontents.  Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of Junius.

Hume was the friend of Montesquieu, though twenty years his junior; and the Esprit des Lois travelled rapidly to Scotland.  There it caught the eye of Adam Ferguson, the author of a treatise on refinement, and by the influence of Hume and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.  Ferguson seems to have been immensely popular in his time, and certainly he has a skill for polished phrase, and a genial paraphrase of other men’s ideas.  His Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was thought by Helvetius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression.  At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible.  He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government.  He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature.  He insists, probably after conversation with Adam Smith, upon the social value of the division of functions.  He does not doubt the original equality of men.  He thinks the luxury of his age has reached the limit of its useful growth.  Property he traces back to a parental desire to make a better provision for children “than is found under the promiscuous management of many copartners.”  Climate has the new importance upon which Montesquieu has insisted; or, at least, as it “ripens the pineapple and the tamarina,” so it “inspires a degree of mildness that can even assuage the rigours of despotical government.”  The priesthood—­this is Hume—­becomes a separate influence under the sway of superstition.  Liberty, he says, “is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government.”  The hand that can bend Ulysses’ bow is certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the obscurity into which he has fallen.  The Esprit des Lois took twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped.  Facile popularisers of this sort may have mollified the drawing-room; but they did not add to political ideas.