es.
Pauperism and ignorance may fester long among the masses before
wealthy and prosperous rulers discover that the interests of their own
class are imperilled; the state of prisons does not concern them
personally; and so long as life and property are fairly secure, they
care little about an efficient police. The Englishman of whom a
Frenchman reported with amazement that he consoled himself for having
been robbed by the reflection that there were no policemen in his
country, must have belonged to this comfortable class. And the
inveterate conservation of abuses in the Church, the Law, and the Army
may be partially explained in a similar way. In France the Church and
the army were really privileged bodies: the vast ecclesiastical
revenues were protected from taxation, and the commissioned ranks of
the army were reserved for the _noblesse_; the French parliaments were
close magisterial corporations. In England these were all open
professions, with no special fiscal rights or social limitations; the
prizes were available for general competition, and as every one had a
chance of winning them by interest or even merit, there was no
formidable outcry against the system.

In politics, therefore, as well as in philosophy, the prevailing habit
of the English mind was more moderate, less thorough-going and
subversive, than in France. Mr. Stephen makes a keen and rapid
analysis of the common-sense psychology, as expounded by Reid and
Dugald Stewart, to show the correspondence at this period between
abstract reasoning and concrete political views, and to illustrate the
limitations which cautious Scotch professors endeavoured to place upon
the inexorable scepticism of Hume. The general spirit of their
teaching was empirical, but the logical consequence of taking
experience as the sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off
the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the
derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics,
there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was
brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which
were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of
the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle said
long afterwards, the Scottish philosophers started from the
mechanical premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an
indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against his conclusions; they
tugged lu