(difference of scale being allowed for) as they would upon a steam
plow, or a threshing machine.

To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so
far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they
regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of
government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According to
them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must take
them, in the main, as we find them. Governments can not be constructed
by premeditated design. They "are not made, but grow." Our business
with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to acquaint
ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt ourselves to them.
The fundamental political institutions of a people are considered by
this school as a sort of organic growth from the nature and life of
that people; a product of their habits, instincts, and unconscious
wants and desires, scarcely at all of their deliberate purposes. Their
will has had no part in the matter but that of meeting the necessities
of the moment by the contrivances of the moment, which contrivances,
if in sufficient conformity to the national feelings and character,
commonly last, and, by successive aggregation, constitute a polity
suited to the people who possess it, but which it would be vain to
attempt to superinduce upon any people whose nature and circumstances
had not spontaneously evolved it.

It is difficult to decide which of these doctrines would be the most
absurd, if we could suppose either of them held as an exclusive
theory. But the principles which men profess, on any controverted
subject, are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they
really hold. No one believes that every people is capable of working
every sort of institution. Carry the analogy of mechanical