gly persuaded that the usage in question is
an urgent evil; others, I am bound to add, judged differently, deeming
it valuable as a security against Boulangism--an object which can be
attained by restricting the number of constituencies to be addressed by
the same candidate. The two American presidents who agreed in saying
that Whig and Tory belong to natural history, proposed a dilemma which
Mr. Bryce wishes to elude. He prefers to stand half-way between the two,
and to resolve general principles into questions of expediency,
probability, and degree: "The wisest statesman is he who best holds the
balance between liberty and order." The sentiment is nearly that of
Croker and De Quincey, and it is plain that the author would discard the
vulgar definition that liberty is the end of government, and that in
politics things are to be valued as they minister to its security. He
writes in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the
American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as
the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest
prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief
abstract of his book: "America is not so much an example in her liberty
as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to
prevent liberty degenerating into licence, and to establish a feeling of
trust and repose under a beneficent government, whose excellence, so
obvious in its freedom, is still more conspicuous in its careful
provision for permanence and stability." Mr. Bryce declares his own
point of view in the following significant terms: "The spirit of 1787
was an English spirit, and therefore a conservative spirit.... The
American constitution is no exception to the rule that everything which
has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots
deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown,
so much the more enduring is it likely to prove.... There is a hearty
puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of
1787.... No men were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the
American Revolution. They made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta
and the Bill of Rights." I descry a bewildered Whig emerging from the
third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke's
_Reflections_, and the eighteen Canons of Dort, and a growing belief in
the function of ghosts to make