e
presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people_." Nay,
experience perhaps justifies him in going further. When popular
discontents are prevalent, something has generally been found amiss in
the constitution or the administration. "The people have no interest
in disorder. When they go wrong, it is their error, and not their
crime." And then he quotes the famous passage from the Memoirs of
Sully, which both practical politicians and political students
should bind about their necks, and write upon the tables of their
hearts:--"The revolutions that come to pass in great states are not
the result of chance, nor of popular caprice.... As for the populace,
it is never from a passion for attack that it rebels, but from
impatience of suffering."

What really gives its distinction to the _Present Discontents_ is not
its plea for indulgence to popular impatience, nor its plea for the
superiority of government by aristocracy, but rather the presence in
it of the thought of Montesquieu and his school, of the necessity
of studying political phenomena in relation, not merely to forms of
government and law, but in relation to whole groups of social facts
which give to law and government the spirit that makes them workable.
Connected with this, is a particularly wide interpretation and a
particularly impressive application of the maxims of expediency,
because a wide conception of the various interacting elements of
a society naturally extends the considerations which a balance of
expediencies will include. Hence, in time, there came a strong
and lofty ideal of the true statesman, his breadth of vision, his
flexibility of temper, his hardly measurable influence. These are the
principal thoughts in the _Discontents_ to which that tract owes its
permanent interest. "Whatever original energy," says Burke, in one
place, "may be supposed either in force or regulation, the operation
of both is in truth merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the
same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual
without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals
or superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious
management of it.... The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute
Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must
depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the
prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and
potency of the la