back upon notions he felt to be false, without a proper realization of their falsity.  His use of Montesquieu shows rather how dangerous a weapon a great idea can be in the hands of one incompetent to understand it, than the fertility it contained.  The merit of Blackstone is his learning, which was substantial, his realization that the powers of law demand some classification, his dim yet constant sense that Montesquieu is right alike in searching for the roots of law in custom and in applying the historical method to his explanations.  But as a thinker he was little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions of his time to question its assumptions.

De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone, what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did perceive, his book has real ability and merit.  De Lolme was a citizen of Geneva, who published his Constitution of England in 1775, after a twelve months’ visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to die in obscurity and want.  His book, as he tells us in his preface, was no mean success, though he derived no profit from it.  Like Blackstone, he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty.  The attitude was not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a witness of the struggle between Junius and the King.  He has, of course, the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of government in purely mechanical terms.  “It is upon the passions of mankind,” he says, “that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the action of the various parts of a state depends.  The machine may vary as to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain intrinsically the same.”  Elsewhere he speaks of government as “a great ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of the figures.”  He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled.  Such an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.  It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.  Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to unstability.  The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal power against the popular.  The King’s interest is safeguarded by the division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the encroachment of the other upon the executive.  His power is limited by parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and so forth.  The theory was not true; though it represented with some accuracy the ideals of the time.