applied his teaching--how slow is the growth of the
human intellect in these matters, with what painful steps man learns
to generalise, how convulsively he clings in the infancy of
civilisation to the formal, the material, the realistic aspects of
things, how late he develops such abstractions as "the State." In all
this Maine first showed the way. As Sir Frederick Pollock has
admirably put it--

Nowadays it may be said that "all have got the seed,"
but this is no justification for forgetting who first
cleared and sowed the ground. We may till fields that
the master left untouched, and one man will bring a
better ox to yoke to the plough, and another a worse;
but it is the master's plough still.

We may conclude with some remarks on Maine's views of the
contemporary problems of political society. Maine was what, for want
of a better term, may be called a Conservative, and, indeed, it may be
doubted whether, with the single exception of Burke, any English
writer has done more to provide English Conservatives with reasons for
the faith that is in them. He has set forth his views in a collection
of polemical essays under the title of _Popular Government_, which
were given to the world in book form in 1885. He viewed the advent of
Democracy with more distrust than alarm--he appears to have thought it
a form of government which could not last--and he has an unerring eye
for its weaknesses.[3] Indeed, his remarks on the facility with which
Democracy yields itself to manipulation by wire-pullers, newspapers,
and demagogues, have found not a little confirmation in such studies
of the actual working of democratic government as M. Ostrogorski's
_Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties_. Maine
emphasised the tyranny of majorities, the enslavement of untutored
minds by political catchwords, their susceptibility to "suggestion,"
their readiness to adopt vicarious opinion in preference to an
intellectual exercise of their own volition. It is not surprising that
the writer who had subjected the theories of the Social Contract to
such merciless criticism sighed for a scientific analysis of political
terms as the first step to clear thinking about politics. Here he was
on strong ground, but for such an analysis we have yet to wait.[4] He
seems to have placed his hopes in the adoption of some kind of written
constitution which, like the American prototype, would safeguard us
from fundamen