that he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat.  Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat who cannot bear to think that democracy will win.  He is dangerously near the frame of mind of Scipio Emilianus, after the movement of the Gracchi and the opening of the Roman revolution.  Scipio came to the conclusion that with whichever party he took sides, or whatever measures a disinterested and capable statesman might devise, he would only aggravate the evil.  Sir Henry Maine would seem to be nearly as despondent.  Hence his book is fuller of apprehension than of guidance, more plausible in alarm than wise or useful in direction.  It is exclusively critical and negative.  There Is, indeed, an admirable account of the constitution of the United States.  But on the one great question on which the constitution of the United States might have been expected to shed light—­the modification of the House of Lords—­Sir Henry Maine explicitly admits (p. 186) that it is very difficult to obtain from the younger institution, the Senate, any lessons which can be of use in the reconstruction of the older.  At every turn, the end of the discussion lands us in a philosophical cul-de-sac, and nothing is so depressing as a cul-de-sac.  The tone is that of the political valetudinarian, watching with uneasy eye the ways of rude health.  Unreflecting optimism about Popular Government is sickening, but calculated pessimism is not much better.

Something, no doubt, may often be gained by the mere cross-examination of catchwords and the exposure of platitudes.  Popular government is no more free from catchwords and platitudes than any other political, religious, or social cause which interests a great many people, and is the subject of much discussion.  Even the Historical Method has its own claptrap.  But one must not make too much of these things.  “In order to love mankind,” said Helvetius, “one must not expect too much from them.”  And fairly to appreciate institutions you must not hold them up against the light that blazes in Utopia; you must not expect them to satisfy microscopic analysis, nor judge their working, which is inevitably rough, awkward, clumsy, and second-best, by the fastidious standards of closet logic.

Before saying more as to the substance of the hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism.  There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago.  A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790.  “Not many persons in the last century could have divined from the previous opinions of Edmund Burke the real substructure of his political creed, or did in fact suspect it till it was uncovered by the early