intment. In the trial of the king adverse points are
slurred over, as if a historian could hold a brief. A more powerful
writer of conservative history appeared about the same time in
Heinrich von Sybel.

* * * * *

About the middle of the fifties, when Sybel's earlier volumes were
coming out, the deeper studies began in France with Tocqueville. He
was the first to establish, if not to discover, that the Revolution
was not simply a break, a reversal, a surprise, but in part a
development of tendencies at work in the old monarchy. He brought it
into closer connection with French history, and believed that it had
become inevitable, when Lewis XVI. ascended the throne, that the
success and also the failure of the movement came from causes that
were at work before. The desire for political freedom was sincere but
adulterated. It was crossed and baffled by other aims. The secondary
and subordinate liberties embarrassed the approach to the supreme goal
of self-government. For Tocqueville was a Liberal of the purest
breed--a Liberal and nothing else, deeply suspicious of democracy and
its kindred, equality, centralisation and utilitarianism. Of all
writers he is the most widely acceptable, and the hardest to find
fault with. He is always wise, always right, and as just as Aristides.
His intellect is without a flaw, but it is limited and constrained. He
knows political literature and history less well than political life;
his originality is not creative, and he does not stimulate with gleams
of new light or unfathomed suggestiveness.

Two years later, in 1858, a work began to appear which was less new
and less polished than Tocqueville's, but is still more instructive
for every student of politics. Duvergier de Hauranne had long
experience of public life. He remembered the day when he saw Cuvier
mount the tribune in a black velvet suit and speak as few orators have
spoken, and carry the electoral law which was the Reform Bill of 1817.
Having quarrelled with the Doctrinaires, he led the attack which
overthrew Guizot, and was one of three on whom Thiers was relying to
save the throne, when the king went away in a cab and carried the
dynasty with him. He devoted the evening of his life to a history of
parliamentary government in France, which extends in ten volumes to
1830, and contains more profound ideas, more political science, than
any other work I know in the compass of literature. He analyse