Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar
circumstances, neglected or contravened. Political development in this
family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by
evolution. On all these points his _Constitutional Government in the
United States_ is only a richer and more mature statement and
illustration of the ideas expressed in his _Congressional Government_.
The main thesis of his _George Washington_ is that the great Virginian
and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern
Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action. Again and again he pays respect to
Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the
conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more
sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable
of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson
has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke
has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of
book and teacher is significant. _Mere Literature_ shows how Mr. Wilson
revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their
lessons well. In _An Old Master and Other Essays_, he had already borne
witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as
compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics
the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic
processes.

Mr. Wilson's _Division and Reunion_ is an admirable treatment of a
question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a
Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known text-book
_The State_, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses
the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the
administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of
medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in