his inaugural lecture as Vinerian professor.  He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in the writings of Bentham and James Mill.  What, perhaps, is most immediately significant is his famous praise of the British Constitution—­the secret of which he entirely misapprehended—­and his discovery of its essence in the separation of powers.  The short sixth chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme.  It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an edifice never before described in detail.  It is, when the last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth antiquarianism of Coke’s Second Institute to the neatly reticulated structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu’s hint.  That it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been made.  The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and balances.  But Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765-9) produced Bentham’s Fragment on Government (1776), and with that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British Constitution.

Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to avoid.  Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed.  It is a removal at every point conditioned by the interest of the people.  For Rousseau declared that the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and he made the people sovereign that there might be no hindrance to their achievement in the shape of sinister interest.  The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation.  It is easy enough then to understand why such a philosophy should have been anathema to Burke.  Rousseau’s eager sympathy for humble men, his optimistic faith in the immediate prospect of popular power were to Burke the symptoms of insane delusion and their author “the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England.”  But Burke forgot that the real secret of Rousseau’s influence was the success of the American Revolution; and no one had done more than Burke himself to promote its cause and justify its principles.  That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which it checked the supposed weakness of the sovereign