Such criticism is revolutionary enough, though when he comes to speak of actual changes, he had little more to propose than a system of peasant proprietorship.  What is striking in the book is its sense of great, impending changes, its thorough grasp of the principle of utility, its realization of the immense agricultural improvement that is possible if the landed system can be so changed as to bring into play the impulses of humble men.  He sees clearly enough that wealth dominates the State; and his interpretation of history is throughout economic.  Ogilvie is one of the first of those agrarian Socialists who, chiefly through Spence and Paine, are responsible for a special current of their own in the great tide of protest against the unjust situation of labor.  Like them, he builds his system upon natural rights; though, unlike them, his natural rights are defended by expediency and in a style that is always clear and logical.  The book itself has rather a curious history.  At its appearance, it seems to have excited no notice of any kind.  Mackintosh knew of its authorship; for he warned its author against the amiable delusion that its excellence would persuade the British government to force a system of peasant proprietorship upon the East India Company.  Reprinted in 1838 as the work of John Ogilby, it was intended to instruct the Chartists in the secret of their oppression; and therein it may well have contributed to the tragicomic land-scheme of Feargus O’Connor.  In 1891 the problem of the land was again eagerly debated under the stimulus of Mr. Henry George; and a patriotic Scotchman published the book with biographical notes that constitute one of the most amazing curiosities in English political literature.

V

Against the school of Rousseau’s English disciples it is comparatively easy to multiply criticisms.  They lacked any historic sense.  Government, for them, was simply an instrument which was made and unmade at the volition of men.  How complex were its psychological foundations they had no conception; with the single factor of consent they could explain the most marvellous edifice of any time.  They were buried beneath a mountain of metaphysical right which they never related to legal facts or to political possibility.  They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led.  They overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves with political affairs.  They made no proper allowance for the protective armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of prescription.  Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must of necessity take account.  They occupy themselves, that is to say, so completely with staatslehre that they do not admit the mollifying influence of politik.  They search for principles of universal right, without the perception that a right which is to be universal must necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its application.