al ability and merit. De Lolme was a citizen of
Geneva, who published his _Constitution of England_ in 1775, after a
twelve months' visit to shores sufficiently inhospitable to leave him to
die in obscurity and want. His book, as he tells us in his preface, was
no mean success, though he derived no profit from it. Like Blackstone,
he was impressed by the necessity of obtaining a constitutional
equilibrium, wherein he finds the secret of liberty. The attitude was
not unnatural in one who, with his head full of Montesquieu, was a
witness of the struggle between Junius and the King. He has, of course,
the limitation common to all writers before Burke of thinking of
government in purely mechanical terms. "It is upon the passions of
mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the
action of the various parts of a state depends. The machine may vary as
to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain
intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great
ballet or dance in which ... everything depends upon the disposition of
the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but
only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled. Such
an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to
unstability. The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal
power against the popular. The King's interest is safeguarded by the
division of Parliament into two Houses, each of which rejects the
encroachment of the other upon the executive. His power is limited by
parliamentary privilege, freedom of the press, the right of taxation and
so forth. The theory was not true; though it represented with some
accuracy the ideals of the time.

Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed. He saw that the
early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the
continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the
result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English
people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power. He
understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the
independence of the judges. He realized that the party-system--he never
used the actual term--while it provides room for men's ambitions at the
same time prevents the