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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
which Mr. Bryce wishes to elude. He prefers to stand halfway between the hvo, and to resolve general principles into questions of expediency, probability, and degree: "The wisest statesman is he \vho best holds the balance between liberty and order." The sentiment is nearly that of Croker and De Quincey, and it is plain that the author would discard the vulgar definition that liberty is the end of government, and that in politics things are to be valued as they minister to its security. He \vrites in the spirit of John Adams when he said that the French and the American Revolution had nothing in common, and of that eulogy of 1688 as the true Restoration, on which Burke and Macaulay spent their finest prose. A sentence which he takes from Judge Cooley contains the brief abstract of his book: "America is not so much an example in her liberty as in the covenanted and enduring securities which are intended to prevent liberty degener- ating into licence, and to establish a feeling of trust and repose under a beneficent government, whose excellence, so obvious in its freedom, is still more conspicuous in its careful provision for permanence and stability." Mr. Bryce declares his own point of view in the following significant terms: "The spirit of 1787 was an English spirit, and therefore a conservatiye spirit. . . . The American con- stitution is no exception to the rule that everything which has power to win the obedience and respect of men must have its roots deep in the past, and that the more slowly every institution has grown, so much the more enduring is it likely to prove. . . . There is a hearty puritanism in the view of human nature which pervades the instrument of 1787. . . . Nomen were less revolutionary in spirit than the heroes of the Alnerican Revolution. They made a revolution in the name of Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights." I descry a bev.i1dered Whig emerging from the third volume with a reverent appreciation of ancestral wisdom, Burke's Reflections, and the eighteen Canons of Dort, and a gro\\tying belief in the function of ghosts to make laws for the quick. When the last Valois consulted his dying mother, she
