proceeds to warn us that if the desire for legislative innovation be
allowed to grow upon us at its present pace--pace assumed to be very
headlong indeed--the chances are that our luck will not last. We shall
have a disaster like Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151).
This is a curiously narrow reading of contemporary history. Did
Austria lose Sadowa, or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan,
in consequence of the passion of either of those Governments for
legislative innovations; or must we not rather, in order to
explain these striking events, look to a large array of military,
geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic considerations and
conditions? If so, what becomes of the moral? England is, no doubt,
the one great civilised power that has escaped an organic or
structural change within the last five-and-twenty years. Within that
period, the American Union, after a tremendous war, has revolutionised
the social institutions of the South, and reconstructed the
constitution. The French Empire has foundered, and a French Republic
once more bears the fortunes of a great State over troubled waters.
Germany has undergone a complete transformation; so has the Italian
peninsula. The internal and the external relations alike of the
Austrian Power are utterly different to-day from what they were twenty
years ago. Spain has passed from monarchy to republic, and back to
monarchy again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty. But what share had
legislative innovation in producing these great changes? No share at
all in any one case. What is the logic, then, of the warning that if
we persist in our taste for legislative innovation, we shall lose
our immunity from the violent changes that have overtaken other
States--changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?

In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are
passing through a great transformation, social, religious, and