f 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,"
between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can
ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold
of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of
freedom. He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of
the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular
government. He saw the inevitability of parties, as also their tendency
to persist in terms of men instead of principles. He was convinced of
the necessity of liberty to the progress of the arts and sciences; and
no one, save Adam Smith, has more acutely insisted upon the evil effect
on commerce of an absolute government. He emphasized the value of
freedom of the press, in which he saw the secret whereby the mixed
government of England was maintained. "It has also been found," he said
in a happy phrase, "... that the people are no such dangerous monsters
as they have been represented, and that it is in every respect better to
guide them like rational creatures than to lead or drive them like brute
beasts." There is, in fact, hardly a page of his work in which some such
acuteness may not be found.

Not, indeed, that a curious blindness is absent. Hume was a typical
child of one aspect of the eighteenth century in his hatred of
enthusiasm, and the form in which he most abominates it is religious.
Why people's religious opinions should lead to antagonism he could no
more understand than why people should refuse to pass one another on a
road. Wars of religion thus seemed to him based upon a merely frivolous
principle; and in his ideal commonwealth he made the Church a department
of the State lest it should get out of hand. He was, moreover, a static
philosop