o the success with which he has done this, and the combined
philosophical depth and grasp of details which his writings exhibit,
that his colossal reputation has been owing. He had prodigious
acquaintance with individual facts, united to the power of classifying
them under their proper heads, and deducing from them their general
and common principles. Like the steam-engine, he could, by turns, turn
a thread round a spindle, and elevate a seventy-four in the air. He
was the Kepler of science; like the immortal German, he had made
eighty thousand observations in the social world; but, like him, he
could deduce the few laws of national advance or decline from the
regular irregularity of their motion.

The expression, _Esprit des Loix_, selected as the title of
Montesquieu's great work, was not happily chosen. What he meant was
not the _Spirit of Laws_, but the causes from which laws have arisen;
the "_Leges Legum_," as Cicero said, to which they were owing, and
from which they had sprung. He ascribed very little influence to human
institutions in moulding the character or determining the felicity of
man. On the contrary, he thought that these institutions were in
general an effect, not a cause. He conceived that they arose, in every
country, from something peculiar in the race from which the nature
descended, or the climate, employments, or mode of earning subsistence
to which it was chained in subsequent times by the physical
circumstance in which it was placed. A certain type or character was
imprinted on every people, either by the ineradicable influence of
blood, which descends to the remotest generations, or the not less
irremovable effect of external and physical circumstances which
attaches to them through all ages. It was this blood and those
circumstances which formed the national character, and through it, in
the course of generations, moulded the national customs and
institutions. Such customs and institutions were those which, having
been framed by necessity, or the dictates of expedience, according to
the circumstances in which each people were placed, were best adapted
to their temper and situation. True wisdom consisted not in altering
but following out the spirit of existing laws and customs; and, in his
own words--"No nation ever yet rose to lasting greatness but from
institutions in conformity to its spirit." No calamities were so great
or irremediable as those which arose from disregarding the separate