these two
systems--by loose phrases, by vague notions, by superstitions, that
enervate the human intellect and endanger social safety. This is the
constant refrain of the pages before us. We should have liked better
evidence. We do not believe that it is a Roman praetorium. Men often
pick up old phrases for new events, even when they are judging events
afresh with independent minds. When a politician of the day speaks of
natural rights, he uses a loose traditional expression for a view of
social equities which has come to him, not from a book, but from a
survey of certain existing social facts. Now the phrase, the literary
description, is the least significant part of the matter. When Mr.
Mill talks of the influence of Bentham's writings, he is careful to
tell us that he does not mean that they caused the Reform Bill or the
Appropriation Clause. "The changes which have been made," says Mill,
"and the greater changes which will be made, in our institutions are
not the work of philosophers, but of the interests and instincts
of large portions of society recently grown into strength"
_(Dissertations_, i. 332). That is the point. It is the action of
these interests and instincts which Sir Henry Maine habitually
overlooks. For is the omission a mere speculative imperfection. It has
an important bearing on the whole practical drift of the book. If he
had made more room for "the common intellect rough-hewing political
truths at the suggestion of common wants and common experience,"
he would have viewed existing circumstances with a less lively
apprehension.

It is easy to find an apposite illustration of what is meant by
saying that this talk of the influence of speculation is enormously
exaggerated and misleading. When Arthur Young was in France in the
autumn of 1787, he noticed a remarkable revolution in manners in two
or three important respects. One of them was a new fashion that had
just come in, of spending some weeks in the country: everybody who had
a country seat went to live there, and such as had none went to visit
those who had. This new custom, observed the admirable Young, is one
of the best that they have taken from England, and "its introduction
was effected the easier being assisted by the magic of Rousseau's
writings." The other and more generally known change was that women
of the first fashion were no longer ashamed of nursing their own
children, and that infants were no longer tightly bound round by
bar