ough their condition was
much improved, constituted a mere dead weight of helpless brutality.

And then he says, that the Roman Empire was dying. Very true: but often
as he quotes Salvian, he omits always to tell us what Roman society was
dying of. Salvian says, that it was dying of vice. Not of bad laws and
class arrangements, but of bad men. M. Guizot belongs to a school which
is apt to impute human happiness and prosperity too exclusively to the
political constitution under which they may happen to live,
irrespectively of the morality of the people themselves. From that, the
constitutionalist school, there has been of late a strong reaction, the
highest exponent, nay the very coryphaeus of which is Mr. Carlyle. He
undervalues, even despises, the influence of laws and constitutions: with
him private virtue, from which springs public virtue, is the first and
sole cause of national prosperity. My inaugural lecture has told you how
deeply I sympathize with his view--taking my stand, as Mr. Carlyle does,
on the Hebrew prophets.

There is, nevertheless, a side of truth in the constitutionalist view,
which Mr. Carlyle, I think, overlooks. A bad political constitution does
produce poverty and weakness: but only in as far as it tends to produce
moral evil; to make men bad. That it can help to do. It can put a
premium on vice, on falsehood, on peculation, on laziness, on ignorance;
and thus tempt the mass to moral degradation, from the premier to the
slave. Russia has been, for two centuries now but too patent a proof of
the truth of this assertion. But even in this case, the moral element is
the most important, and just the one which is overlooked. To have good
laws, M. Guizot is apt to forget, you must first have good men to make
them; and second, you must have good men to carry them out, after they
are made. Bad men can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions.
Look at the working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III
and Anne, and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who
work them are false and venal. Look, on the other hand, at the Roman
Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see how
well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are working it.

Bad laws, I say, will work tolerably under good men, if fitted to the
existing circumstances by men of the world, as all Roman laws were. If
they had not been such, how was the Roman Empi