courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.

Such excursions must, of course, lead the student far afield; he will often get quite out of sight of his starting-point, the 'standard authority;' but he will not on that account be lost. The fact is, that all literature teems with suggestions on this topic of politics. Just as the chance news item, the unstudied traveller's reminiscence, the passing social or financial scandal,* and every hint of any present contact of men with law or authority, illuminates directly, or by inference, the institutions of our own day, similar random rays thrown across the pages of old books by the unpremeditated words of writers quite guiltless of such instructive intent may light up, for those who are alert to see such things, the most intimate secrets of state. If it be beyond hoping for to find a whole Greville for every age of government, there may be found Grevillian scraps, at least, in the literature of almost every time. From men as far back and as well remembered as Cicero, down to men as recent and as easily forgotten

*Did not the Dilke trial in London, for instance, help us to understand at least one influence that may sometimes make a lawyer Home Secretary?

as several who might be named, politicians have loved to explain to posterity the part they took in conspicuous affairs; and that portion of posterity which studies politics by inference ought to be profoundly thankful to them for yielding to the taste.

Approach the life of States by such avenues, and you shall be convinced of the organic nature of political society. View society from what point you will, you always catch sight of some part of government; man is so truly a 'political animal' that you cannot examine him at all without seeing the points-points of his very structure-whereat he touches and depends upon, or upholds, the State.

In 1850, while Governor-General of Canada, Lord Elgin writes to Lord Grey:

"Our Reciprocity measure was pressed by us in Washington last session, just as a railway bill, in 1845 or 1846, would have been passed in Parliament. There was no Government to deal with, . . . it was all a matter of canvassing this member of Congress or the other."*

What? 'No Government to deal with?' Here's a central truth to be found in none of the 'standard authorities,' and yet to be seen by a practised diplomatist all the way from Canada. About the same date M. Bacourt came to this country to represent the French

* Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, p. 121.

Government and be made wretched by the crude deportment of the Americans. His chief concern was to get away to some country where people were less unconventionally at their ease in drawing-rooms; but he turned, when necessary, to the business of his legation; and whenever he did so he found that "here diplomatic affairs are not treated as everywhere else, where we communicate with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and arrange the matter with him alone." He must 'arrange' the matter with several committees of Congress. He must go to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Winthrop, whose "husbands are members of the House of Representatives, and on the committee having charge of commercial affairs, in which" he "is interested," for "they say that these gentlemen are very particular about visits from foreign ministers to their wives."* Just Lord Elgin's testimony. Again the 'standard authorities' are added to, and that in a quarter where we should least expect to find them supplemented. We need despair of no source.

These are only near and easily recognized illustrations of the errant mode of study I am expounding and advocating. Other systems besides our own receive similar chance illumination in the odd corners of all sorts of books. Now and again you strike mines like the *Souvenirs of a Diplomat, pp. 189, 281.

"Mémoires of Madame de Rémusat," the "Letters" of Walpole, or the "Diary" of a Pepys or an Evelyn; at other periods you must be content to find only slender veins of the ore of familiar observation and intimate knowledge of affairs for which you are delving; but your search will seldom be altogether futile. Some newly opened archive office may offer cahiers, such as revealed to de Tocqueville, more than all other records, the ancien régime. Some elder Hamerton may tell you of the significant things to be seen 'round his house.' All correspondence and autobiography will repay perusal, even when not so soaked in affairs as the letters of Cromwell, or so reminiscent of politics as the "Memoirs of Samuel Romilly."

Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates that life, nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a political animal, comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect to advance liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether those people enjoy

liberty. With reference to laws and constitutions of our own day, we can learn such things best by supplementing books and study by travel and observation. The best taught class in modern public law would be a travelling class. Other times than our own we must perforce be content to see through other men's eyes.

In other words, statute-books and legal commentaries are all very well in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that they furnish only the crude body colors for your picture of the state's life, upon which all your finer luminous and atmospheric effects are afterwards to be worked. It is high time to recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest literary methods. Only master workers in language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest success in making real in words the complex life of states. If I might act as the interpreter of the new-school economists of whom I have already spoken, I trust with due reverence, I should say that this is the thought which, despite their too frequent practical contempt for artistic literary form, is possessing them. John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy; in order to simplify their processes, they deliberately stripped