has enlightened
this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric. But
Montesquieu was more than this. He emphasized legislation as the main
mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that
decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the
true significance. Nor had any thinker before his time so emphasized the
importance of liberty as the true end of government; even the placid
Blackstone adopted the utterance from him in his inaugural lecture as
Vinerian professor. He insisted, too, on the danger of perversion to
which political principle lies open; a feeling which found consistent
utterance both in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention, and in
the writings of Bentham and James Mill. What, perhaps, is most
immediately significant is his famous praise of the British
Constitution--the secret of which he entirely misapprehended--and his
discovery of its essence in the separation of powers. The short sixth
chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De
Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful
validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the
last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth
antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated
structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it
was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been
made. The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been
more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and
balances. But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's
_Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the
realistic study of the British Constitution.

Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from
English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an
influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those
that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to
avoid. Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference
between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power
of government which Locke had proposed. It is a removal at every point
conditioned by the interest of the people. For Rousseau declared that
the existing distribution of power in Europe was a monstrous thing, and
he made the people sovereign that there might be no hi