characters stamped on the different races and nations of men by the
hand of the Almighty, or seeking to force upon one people or one race
the institutions which have arisen among, and are adapted to, another.

Such are the fundamental principles which run through Montesquieu's
writings, and to the elucidation of which he devoted the fifteen best
years of his life. It will readily be perceived that they are entirely
at variance with the whole doctrines of the French philosophers of the
latter part of the eighteenth century, and which were practically
enforced and carried into effect in their great Revolution. With them
institutions were every thing; national character, descent,
employment, or physical circumstances, nothing. All mankind would be
the same if they only enjoyed the same liberty, laws, and
institutions. The differences observable among them were entirely the
result of the different governments forced upon men, in various stages
of their progress, by the tyranny of kings, the force of conquest, or
the machinations of priests. One frame of institutions, one code of
laws, one set of government maxims, were adapted for all the world,
and if practically acted upon would every where produce the same pure
and upright character in the people. Vice and wickedness were the
hateful effect of aristocratic pride, kingly lusts, or sacerdotal
delusion; the human heart was naturally innocent, and bent only upon
virtue; when the debasing influence of these corrupters of men was
removed, it would universally resume its natural direction. Hence the
maxim of Robespierre--"Le peuple est _toujours bon_, le magistrat
toujours corruptible." Hence the readiness with which the
constitution-mongers at Paris set themselves to prepare skeletons of
government for all nations, and their universal identity with that
originally cast during the fervour of the Revolution for the Great
Nation. Hence also, it may be added, their experienced evils, short
duration, and universal sweeping away, within a few years, before the
accumulated suffering and aroused indignation of mankind.

It was owing to this fundamental variance between the doctrines of
Montesquieu and those of the greater part of his contemporaries, and
nearly the whole generation which succeeded him, that the comparative
obscurity of his fame after his death, and the neglect which his
writings for long experienced in France, are to be ascribed. When we
contemplate the profound natur