he
answers to them were stated in articulate formulas and distinct
theories. They were not merely written in books; they so fascinated the
imagination and inflamed the hopes of the time, that thousands of men
were willing actually to go down into the streets and to shed their
blood for the realisation of their generous dream of a renovated
society. The same sight has been seen since, and even when we do not see
it, we are perfectly aware that the same temper is smouldering. Those
were premature attempts to convert a crude aspiration into a political
reality, and to found a new social order on a number of umcompromising
deductions from abstract principles of the common weal. They have had
the natural effect of deepening the English dislike of a general theory,
even when such a theory did no more than profess to announce a remote
object of desire, and not the present goal of immediate effort.

It is not only the Socialists who are responsible for the low esteem
into which a spirit of political generalisation has fallen in other
countries, in consequence of French experience. Mr. Mill has described
in a well-known passage the characteristic vice of the leaders of all
French parties, and not of the democratic party more than any other.
'The commonplaces of politics in France,' he says, 'are large and
sweeping practical maxims, from which, as ultimate premisses, men reason
downwards to particular applications, and this they call being logical
and consistent. For instance, they are perpetually arguing that such and
such a measure ought to be adopted, because it is a consequence of the
principle on which the form of government is founded; of the principle
of legitimacy, or the principle of the sovereignty of the people. To
which it may be answered that if these be really practical principles,
they must rest on speculative grounds; the sovereignty of the people
(for example) must be a right foundation for government, because a
government thus constituted tends to produce certain beneficial effects.
Inasmuch, however, as no government produces all possible beneficial
effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences; and
since these cannot be combated by means drawn from the very causes which
produce them, it would often be a much stronger recommendation of some
practical arrangement that it does not follow from what is called the
general principle of the government, than that it does,'[2]

The English feeling for