they gave to English institutions.  Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch’s will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom.  The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure.  The liberty of unlicensed printing—­less admirable than they accounted it—­the difference between a Habeas Corpus and a lettre de cachet, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement.  The English constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration.  Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known.  Locke’s system was a generalization from its significance at a special crisis.  Hume had partial glimpses of its inner substance.  But for most it had become a discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs.  Its analysis as a connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty.  What was more significant was the realization of Montesquieu’s import simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.  Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.  Rousseau’s time was not yet; though within a score of years it was possible to see him as the rival to Burke’s conservatism.

It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies the Esprit des Lois (1748).  It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method.  The present is to be explained by its ancestry.  Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which they derive.  It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin’s Political Justice; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive.  Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw—­the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom.  He was, said Burke, “the greatest genius which has enlightened this age”; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric.  But Montesquieu was more than this.  He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance.  Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in