at any time got a real hold of any considerable mass of the people of
this country, or that any of the great innovations in domestic policy
since the end of Lord Liverpool's administration have been inspired
or guided by Rousseauite assumptions. Godwin, whose book on Political
Justice was for a long time the great literary fountain of English
Radicalism, owed quite as much to the utilitarian Helvétius as to the
sentimental Rousseau. Nor can either William Cobbett or Joseph Hume be
said to have dealt largely in _a priori_. What makes the Radical of
the street is mostly mother-wit exercising itself upon the facts of
the time. His weakness is that he does not know enough of the facts of
other times.

Sir Henry Maine himself points to what has had a far more decisive
influence on English ways of thinking about politics than his two
philosophers, put together. "The American Republic," he says (p. 11),
"has greatly influenced the favour into which popular government grew.
It disproved the once universal assumptions that no Republic could
govern a large territory, and that no strictly Republican government
could be stable." Nothing can be more true. When Burke and Chatham
and Fox persistently declared that the victory of England over the
colonists would prove fatal in the long run to the liberties of
England itself, those great men were even wiser than they knew.
The success of popular government across the Atlantic has been the
strongest incentive to the extension of popular government here.
We need go no further back than the Reform Bill of 1867 to remind
ourselves that the victory of the North over the South, and the
extraordinary clemency and good sense with which that victory
was used, had more to do with the concession of the franchise to
householders in boroughs than all the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and
all the diplomacies of Mr. Disraeli.