point. He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in
human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke
or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection. So, too, it is the sense
of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who
should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical
substance of these questions he leaves undetermined. Politics, he
thinks, may one day be a science; though he considers the world still
too young for general truths therein. The maxims he suggests as of
permanent value, "that a hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals,
and a people voting by their representatives form the best monarchy,
autocracy and democracy"; that "free governments ... are the most
ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more
favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political
body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most
thinkers at the present time. And when he constructs an ideal
constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as
practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the
historical method had not yet come fully into being.

Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance
of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration
is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government
corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later
thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces. He sees that
the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance
of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was
demonstrated by the failure of George III. "In all governments," as he
says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret,"