utely and dispassionately the broad facts and the
real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and
mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice
of the party press.

An outgrowth of his treble position as banker, economic writer, and
general litterateur, was his charming book 'Lombard Street.' Most
writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most business men
cannot write, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable
or untrue: he put all his literary gifts at its service, and produced a
book as instructive as a trade manual and more delightful than most
novels. Its luminous, easy, half-playful "business talk" is irresistibly
captivating. It is a description and analysis of the London money market
and its component parts,--the Bank of England, the joint-stock banks,
the private banks, and the bill-brokers. It will live, however, as
literature and as a picture, not as a banker's guide; as the vividest
outline of business London, of the "great commerce" and the fabric of
credit which is the basis of modern civilization and of which London is
the centre, that the world has ever known.

Previous to this, the most widely known of his works--'The English
Constitution,' much used as a text-book--had made a new epoch in
political analysis, and placed him among the foremost thinkers and
writers of his time. Not only did it revolutionize the accepted mode of
viewing that governmental structure, but as a treatise on government in
general its novel types of classification are now admitted commonplaces.
Besides its main themes, the book is a great store of thought and
suggestion on government, society, and human nature,--for as in all his
works, he pours on his nominal subject a flood of illumination and
analogy from the unlikeliest sources; and a piece of eminently
pleasurable reading from end to end. Its basic novelty lay in what seems
the most natural of inquiries, but which in fact was left for Bagehot's
original mind even to think of,--the actual working of the governmental
system in practice, as distinguished from legal theory. The result of
this novel analysis was startling: old powers and checks went to the
rubbish heap, and a wholly new set of machinery and even new springs of
force and life were substituted. He argued that the actual use of the
English monarchy is not to do the work of government, but through its
roots in the past to gain popular loyal