transplant the peculiar and exceptional growth of English history, to a country whose history from the fourteenth century downwards had been so entirely different. (Burke is now seen to have been egregiously superficial when he declared the pre-revolutionary constitution of France to be formed upon principles similar to ours. There was, it is true, a monarchy, an aristocracy, a commonalty, with local parliaments, and the possibility of States-General, resembling in some sort our double chamber. But apparent similarity of social divisions and political forms may easily disguise a radical diversity in the whole conditions of public order. To give a nation a king with powers limited to suggestion, a house of hereditary peers, a house of popular representatives, and a government by cabinet, is not necessarily to give them the English constitution. Underneath the political forms are the vast forces of national temperament, ancient usage, the previous course of the national history, the stage of development. To maintain that these are absolutely beyond the reach of modification of the most radical kind, is to share a very common and a very coarse error. But it is a still worse error to assume that such modification may be effected instantly, and at

1 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, Works, i. 488, b.

will, by the imposition of legislative forms from without. No identity or analogy between the outsides of two systems of government is to be taken for a certain sign that the concealed internal forces are the same, or that the seat of substantial power is the same.

Nominally, the governments of France and England were both monarchies-the one limited, the other absolute. But we may not stop at this first difference between them. There were many others, and of as much moment. The English system, in spite of the fragments of prerogative which George III. had by disreputable shifts and devices contrived to resume, was essentially aristocratic and oligarchic. The nobles and landowners governed the country through partially popular forms. But the monarchy in England was 1 still much stronger against the aristocracy, than the latter in France was against the king. The weaker element in our system was still not so weak as the corresponding element in France. Again, the traditions. of the State Church since 1688 had been aristocratic, and not monarchic. In France they were entirely monarchic and anti-aristocratic. Witness the com

paratively small ado with which the Clergy went over to the side of the Third Estate in the disputes between the orders on the first meeting of the States

General. In each country the main spiritual power allied itself with that branch of the temporal power, which had defeated the other branch, in the contest that grew up after the decay of the feudal system. But in England, where somehow there seems a natural tendency to compensation and equilibrium, such as it is, the power of the Church and its aristocratic coadjutors was encountered by a strong body of Protestant | Dissenters. This kind of balance was wholly absent in France. It may be said that the freethinkers there supplied the resistance to the Church, which in England came from the Independents. One might have thought so, but for the assured fact that the freethinkers in power treated religion with the most timorous respect.1 Camille Desmoulins expressed their general feeling, in his peculiar way, when he said, “Les rois sont mûrs, mais le bon dieu ne l'est pas encore." Within the Church there was contention, it is true. The Low Clergy looked upon the High Clergy much as the Third Estate looked upon the Nobles. But this was a contest within their own forum.

The existence of a balance of forces is the elementary condition of constitutionalism. For this we require the constant play within certain bounds of a

1 Cf. M. Quinet's La Révolution, i. 124-184, ii. 132-178, &c.

number of forces, none of which is so much superior in weight or energy to any of the rest as to be absolutely neutralizing. In France, neither in the spiritual nor in the temporal order was any action of this kind possible. Each institution and company of men was either too strong or too weak. Each stood apart in an isolation, which was not less complete for not being

of an avowedly and violently unfriendly character. We look in vain for any spot of common ground on which a constitutional struggle could have been carried on. The aristocracy were a caste, despising the roturiers and every other class. The court was still jealous of the aristocracy. Even within a year of his execution, Louis XVI. is said to have apprehended attempts on the royal power from this side. The Third Estate, untrained in habits of united action, hating the nobles, and not loving the clergy, could plainly only carry on one sort of contest with their political superiors — a war à outrance. The moment that they insisted on vote by heads instead of by orders-thus, as they were double the number of either of the two other orders, assuming the entire power--it was clear that previous institutions had finally incapacitated their minds for entertaining the barest constitutional idea. Where you had classes separated by sharp and impassable boundaries, where

the habit and manner even of moderate and fair political or religious encounter was unknown, where none of the rival parties to the conflict agreed as to a single premiss or first principle on which measures might have been discussed, and where one order insisted, by their arrangements, on being supreme in every decision, what chance was there for any free and various play of tolerably equal forces?

The French constitutionalists, allowing their sanguine and patriotic feelings to overcome their judgment and vision of what was possible, tried ardently to carry out the hopeless project which Burke reviled them for neglecting, simply because he could not perceive that the means to which they resorted, and which, as he knew, could never lead to the end which he and they both desired, were the best and only means they had. The monarchy was the only centre from which they could work, and this was implacably hostile, in the first place, and in the second incurably weak, from its complete and unparalleled isolation. They were wrong, not in their choice of means, but in mistaking an impracticable for a feasible project. In talking to them about the English Revolution of 1688, and holding it up for admiration, their monitor showed a strange misconception either of the French or of the English