more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.

It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened
this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent