the historical method to his explanations. But as a thinker he was
little more than an optimistic trifler, too content with the conditions
of his time to question its assumptions.

De Lolme is a more interesting figure; and though, as with Blackstone,
what he failed to see was even more remarkable than what he did
perceive, his book has real ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the