In one European country, and in one alone, the people have been so strong, and the government so weak, that the history of legislation, taken as a whole, is, notwithstanding a few aberrations, the history of slow but constant concession: reforms which would have been refused to argument have been yielded from fear; while, from the steady increase of democratic opinions, protection after protection and privilege after privilege have, even in our own time, been torn away; until the old institutions, though they retain their former name, have lost their former vigor, and there no longer remains a doubt as to what their fate must ultimately be. Nor need we add that in this same country where, more than in any other of Europe, legislators are the exponents and the servants of the popular will, the progress has, on this account, been more undeviating than elsewhere; there has been neither anarchy nor revolution; and the world has been made familiar with the great truth that one main condition of the prosperity of a people is that its rulers shall have very little power, that they shall exercise that power very sparingly, and that they shall by no means presume to raise themselves into supreme judges of the national interests, or deem themselves authorized to defeat the wishes of those for whose benefit alone they occupy the post intrusted to them.
