newspapers will recount, that the rule of the existing dynasty (the people) is better than the rule of the fallen dynasty (the aristocracy).  A people very rarely hears two sides of a subject in which it is much interested; the popular organs take up the side which is acceptable, and none but the popular organs in fact reach the people.  A people never hears censure of itself.  No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs.  A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

No.  IX.

Its history, and the effects of that history.—­Conclusion.

A volume might seem wanted to say anything worth saying [Footnote:  Since the first edition of this book was published several valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light on our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs’ Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman’s lecture on “The Growth of the English Constitution,” and the chapter on the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his History of the Norman Conquest:  but we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and as it is most desirable that we should have.] on the History of the English Constitution, and a great and new volume might still be written on it, if a competent writer took it in hand.  The subject has never been treated by any one combining the lights of the newest research and the lights of the most matured philosophy.  Since the masterly book of Hallam was written, both political thought and historical knowledge have gained much, and we might have a treatise applying our strengthened calculus to our augmented facts.  I do not pretend that I could write such a book, but there are a few salient particulars which may be fitly brought together, both because of their past interest and of their present importance.

There is a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in all the rude nations that have attained civilisation.  These nations seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative absolutism.  The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress rebellion, no organised espionage to spy out discontent, no skilled bureaucracy to smooth the ruts of obedient life.  The early king was indeed consecrated by a religious sanction; he was essentially a man apart, a man above others, divinely anointed or even God-begotten.  But in nations capable of freedom this religious domination was never