ty and support for the real
government, which the masses would not obey if they realized its
genuine nature; that "it raises the army though it does not win the
battle." He showed that the function of the House of Peers is not as a
co-ordinate power with the Commons (which is the real government), but
as a revising body and an index of the strength of popular feeling.
Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can
change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and
debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only
change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed
and care little for speeches which can effect nothing.

Just before 'Lombard Street' came his scientific masterpiece, 'Physics
and Politics'; a work which does for human society what the 'Origin of
Species' does for organic life, expounding its method of progress from
very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones. Indeed, one of its main
lines is only a special application of Darwin's "natural selection" to
societies, noting the survival of the strongest (which implies in the
long run the best developed in all virtues that make for social
cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much more than that, in
spite of its heavy debt to all scientific and institutional research,
that it remains a first-rate feat of original constructive thought. It
is the more striking from its almost ludicrous brevity compared with the
novelty, variety, and pregnancy of its ideas. It is scarcely more than a
pamphlet; one can read it through in an evening: yet there is hardly any
book which is a master-key to so many historical locks, so useful a
standard for referring scattered sociological facts to, so clarifying to
the mind in the study of early history. The work is strewn with fertile
and suggestive observations from many branches of knowledge. Its leading
idea of the needs and difficulties of early societies is given in one of
the citations.

The unfinished 'Economic Studies' are partially a re-survey of the same
ground on a more limited scale, and contain in addition a mass of the
nicest and shrewdest observations on modern trade and society, full of
truth and suggestiveness. All the other books printed under his name are
collections either from the Economist or from outside publications.

As a thinker, Bagehot's leading positions may be roughly summarized
thus: in history, that reason