. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the
simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and
one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a
general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of
English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less
admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas
Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments,
all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a
magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an
immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to
Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was
a generalization from its significance at a special crisis. Hume had
partial glimpses of its inner substance. But for most it had become a
discreet series of remedies for particular wrongs. Its analysis as a
connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil
Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty. What was
more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import
simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.
Montesquieu thus became the prophet of a new race of thinkers.
Rousseau's time was not yet; though within a score of years it was
possible to see him as the rival to Burke's conservatism.

It is worth while to linger for a moment upon the thesis which underlies
the _Esprit des Lois_ (1748). It is a commonplace now that Montesquieu
is to be regarded as the founder of the historical method. The present
is to be explained by its ancestry. Laws, governments, customs are not
truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin
and the country from which they derive. It would be inaccurate, with
Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the
systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in
the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political
Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time
such abstract systems were on the defensive. Therein, with all his
faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly
saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the
high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past
wisdom. He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which