Harold J. Laski

Its analysis as a connected whole invigorated thought as nothing had done since the Civil Wars had elaborated the theory of parliamentary sovereignty.

What was more significant was the realization of Montesquieu's import simultaneously with the effort of George III to revive crown influence.

Laws, governments, customs are not truths absolute and universal, but relative to the time of their origin and the country from which they derive.

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.

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.

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.

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 hindrance to their achievement in the shape of sinister interest.

The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation.

That revolution established what Europe might well consider a democracy; and its statesmen were astonished not less at the vigilance with which America guarded against the growth of autocratic government, than at the soberness with which…

America made herself independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could remove what…

Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied.

But from the moment of its appearance it is an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious.

Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion.

There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods.

The former's rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the previous generation.

The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection.

The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt's wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late.

But no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau's questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought.

The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly.

If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.

He does not deny it humanitarianism, and a still lingering sense of freedom, but it is steeped in corruption and displays nothing so much as a luxurious and selfish effeminacy.

Politics has become nothing save a means of promoting selfish interests.

The church, the theatre, and the arts have all of them lost their former virtues.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.