of Bedford would not have deceived a schoolboy had it not provided a bulwark against improvement.  It was ridiculous to describe the Commons as representative of property so long as places like Manchester and Sheffield were virtually disfranchised.  His picture of the royal prerogative was a portrait against every detail of which what was best in England had struggled in the preceding century and a half.  He has nothing to say of the cabinet, nothing of ministerial responsibility, nothing of the party system.  What he did was to produce the defence of a non-existent system which acted as a barrier to all legal, and much political, progress in the next half-century.  He gave men material without cause for satisfaction.

As a description of the existing government there is thus hardly an element of Blackstone’s work which could stand the test of critical inquiry.  But even worse was its philosophy.  As Bentham pointed out, he was unaware of the distinction between society and government.  The state of nature exists, or fails to exist, with startling inconsistency.  Blackstone, in fact, was a Lockian who knows that Hume and Montesquieu have cut the ground from under his master’s feet, and yet cannot understand how, without him, a foundation is to be supplied.  Locke, indeed, seems to him, as a natural conservative, to go too far, and he rejects the original contract as without basis in history; yet contractual notions are present at every fundamental stage of his argument.  The sovereign power, so we are told, is irresistible; and then because Blackstone is uncertain what right is to mean, we hear of moral limitations upon its exercise.  He speaks continually of representation without any effort to examine into the notions it conveys.  The members of society are held to be equal; and great pains are taken to justify existent inequalities.  “The natural foundations of sovereignty,” he writes, “are the three great requisites... of wisdom, goodness and power.”  Yet there is nowhere any proof in his book that steps have been taken in the British Constitution to associate these with the actual exertion of authority.  Nor has he clear notions of the way in which property is to be founded.  Communism, he writes in seventeenth century fashion, is the institution of the all-beneficent Creator who gave the earth to men; property comes when men occupy some special portion of the soil continuously or mix their labor with movable possessions.  This is pure Locke; though the conclusions drawn by Blackstone are utterly remote from the logical result of his own premises.

The truth surely is that Blackstone had, upon all these questions, only the most confused sort of notions.  He had to preface his work with some sort of philosophic theory because the conditions of the age demanded it.  The one source of enlightenment when he wrote was Hume; but for some uncertain reason, perhaps his piety, Blackstone makes no reference to the great sceptic’s speculations.  So that he was driven