state of things in which an undivided legislature is necessary to resist
a too powerful executive, whilst two chambers can be made to curb and
neutralise each other. Both Tocqueville and Turgot are said to have
wavered on this point.

It has been said that Tocqueville never understood the federal
constitution. He believed, to his last edition, that the opening words
of the first section, "all legislative powers herein granted," meant
"tous les pouvoirs legislatifs determines par les representants." Story
thought that he "has borrowed the greater part of his reflections from
American works [meaning his own and Lieber's] and little from his own
observation." The French minister at Washington described his book as
"interessant mais fort peu exact"; and even the _Nation_ calls it
"brilliant, superficial, and attractive." Mr. Bryce can never be accused
of imperfect knowledge or penetration, of undue dependence upon others,
or of writing up to a purpose. His fault is elsewhere. This scholar,
distinguished not only as a successful writer of history, which is said
to be frequent, but as a trained and professed historian, which is rare,
altogether declines the jurisdiction of the HISTORICAL REVIEW. His
contumacy is in gross black and white: "I have had to resist another
temptation, that of straying off into history." Three stout volumes tell
how things are, without telling how they came about. I should have no
title to bring them before this tribunal, if it were not for an
occasional glimpse at the past; if it were not for a strongly marked
and personal philosophy of American history which looms behind the Boss
and the Boom, the Hoodlum and the Mugwump.

There is a valid excuse for preferring to address the unhistoric mind.
The process of development by which the America of Tocqueville became
the America of Lincoln has been lately described with a fulness of
knowledge which no European can rival. Readers who thirst for the
running stream can plunge and struggle through several thousand pages of
Holst's _Verfassungsgeschichte_, and it is better to accept the division
of labour than to take up ground so recently covered by a work which, if
not very well designed or well composed, is, by the prodigious digestion
of material, the most instructive ever written on the natural history of
federal democracy. The author, who has spent twenty years on American
debates and newspapers, began during the pause between Sadowa and Woerth,
when