adoption, once said:

"There is this difference between the English, French, and Germans:
that the English only change what is necessary and as far as it is
necessary; the French plunge into all sorts of novelties by whole
masses, get into a chaos, see that they are fools and retrace their
steps as quickly, with a high degree of practical sense in all this
impracticability; the Germans attempt no change without first recurring
to first principles and metaphysics beyond them, systematizing the
smallest details in their minds; and when at last they mean to apply
all their meditation, opportunity, with its wide and swift wings
of a gull, is gone."

This was written more than sixty years ago before the present French
Republic and the present German Empire, and Lieber would doubtless have
modified his conclusions in view of those great achievements in government
if he were writing to-day. But he does correctly indicate the differences
of method and the dangers avoided by the practical course which he ascribes
to the English, and in accordance with which the great structure of British
and American liberty has been built up generation after generation and
century after century. Through all the seven hundred years since Magna
Charta we have been shaping, adjusting, adapting our system to the new
conditions of life as they have arisen, but we have always held on to
everything essentially good that we have ever had in the system. We have
never undertaken to begin over again and build up a new system under the
idea that we could do it better. We have never let go of Magna Charta or
the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
When we take account of all that governments have sought to do and have
failed to do in this selfish and sinful world, we find that as a rule the
application of new theories of government, though devised by the most