nce of anything like a philosophy of society as a
whole. Nobody who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill--I am not sure
whether we should not add even De Maistre--can imagine any of them as
setting to work on a general political speculation without reference
to particular social conditions. They would have conducted the inquiry
in strict relation to the stage at which a community happened to be,
in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government.
So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir
Henry Maine to do. It is obvious that systems of government, called
by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and
maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal
forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according
to the variety of social circumstances around them. Yet it is here
inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and
sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen Presidents of the
Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile. If
England and Bolivia were at all akin in history, religion, race,
industry, the fate of Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive to
English Premiers.

One of the propositions which Sir Henry Maine is most anxious to bring
home to his readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form to which
it tends, is of all kinds of government by far the most difficult.
He even goes so far as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to
Democracies some portion of the advantage which Bentham claimed for
them, and "putting this advantage at the highest, it is _more than
compensated_ by one great disadvantage," namely, its difficulty. This
generalisation is repeated with an emphasis that surprises us, for two
reasons. In the first place, if the proposition could be proved to be
true, we fail to see that it would be particularly effective in its
practical bearings. Everybody whose opinions are worth consideration,
and everybody who has ever come near the machinery of democratic
government, is only too well aware that whether it be far the most
difficult form of government or not, it is certainly difficult enough
to tax the powers of statesmanship to the very uttermost. Is not that
enough? Is anything gained by pressing us further than that? "Better
be a poor fisherman," said Danton as he walked in the last hours of
his life on the banks of the Aube, "better be a poor fisherman, than