American judicial bench shows hardly a single legist of the stamp of Marshall, of Kent, or of Story. It may well be doubted whether any two Americans have at the present moment anything like the authority in Europe which attached to Franklin and to Washington.

Add to this that the tendency of events diminishes the influence of the forces on which the strength of the United States has depended. The villages and the smaller towns have exhibited local self-government in its best and most effective form. But year after year the influence of the country districts grows less, whilst the cities which have been the centre of all that is worst in American politics increase in size, in number, and in power. The honest country folk and the sturdy farmers are still happily the backbone of the community, but it is perfectly clear that their authority must in the long run yield to the authority of the cities. The farmers of New England are going west; Frenchmen from Canada, or Irishmen from Liverpool or Cork, are becoming the occupants of New England. The time will come when the Pilgrim Fathers have few or no representatives in the country they settled.

American prosperity, lastly, is due in the main to the possession by Americans of limitless land. Travellers who a century or a century and a half hence follow in the steps of Mr. Bryce as he has followed in the steps of M. de Tocqueville, will find the United States a fully occupied country. The filling up of vacant land will mean the clashing of class interests and the growth of the eternal conflict between rich and poor. Nor will the United States possess even the resources of modern Europe, for when America is filled by its people there will be no remaining New World, reserved as it were by Providence, as a refuge for the poor. Can anyone assert with confidence that institutions which even now exhibit terrible flaws will bear the stress of difficulties which the modern civilised world has not yet been compelled to

meet?

When, however, all the possible dangers of the future which can be suggested by rational pessimism are enumerated, it is, we hold, still apparent that, as Mr. Bryce contends, the faults which mar the public life of America are not symptoms of national ruin or degradation. The American Commonwealth, when compared, not with an ideal state, but with the existing polities of modern Europe, stands the comparison fairly enough. The noble Constitution, created by the genius of the most successful political archi

tects the world has seen, is still a model to be studied by reformers. The virtues of the people counteract in many respects the vicious working of their institutions. In no country in the world does the ordinary citizen enjoy so much of prosperity, happiness, and true welfare as in America.

Our second conclusion is, that even so friendly a survey of the American Commonwealth as that carried out with infinite labour and skill by Mr. Bryce goes but a little way to justify the intense faith which Americans have in the 'soundness of their institutions and in the future of their 'country.'

The citizens of the Union are trying, and that on the largest scale, the most remarkable experiment in government the world has witnessed. Their claim is to have advanced further on the road of progress than any other nation. Their institutions ought, therefore, to be tried by more or less of an ideal standard. How do they stand the test? The eulogies or apologies of an admirer even so judicious as Mr. Bryce answer this question. His pages abound with suggestions that the evils of modern American life can be paralleled in other times and in other countries. If American politicians take bribes, Walpole knew the price of every one of the M.P.'s whom he addressed as 'honourable gentlemen.' If voters are bought and sold at New York, it is not so long since the corruption of electors, not to mention the purchase of boroughs, was known in England. With us, too, as in America, political services, not always of a very exalted kind, smooth a lawyer's path to the bench. The sale of livings casts a slur, scarcely noted by Englishmen, on the character of the Established Church.

In the search for parallels our author's ingenuity and the variety of his knowledge are here and there, in our judgement, a little misleading. The purchase of commissions down to a recent date in the English army, and the sale of judicial places in France under the ancien régime, were anomalous and impolitic arrangements; but they bear no likeness whatever to corrupt practices either at New York or elsewhere. An officer who bought a commission no more gave a bribe than he picked a pocket, and the French magistracy who, by purchase and inheritance, made judicial functions the property and the special duty of certain eminent families formed under the ancient monarchy the most independent and the least corrupt portion of the civil service. The means by which a French magistrate attained his place involved no

element either of concealment or disgrace. Grant, however, what may easily be conceded, that every abuse to be found at present in the United States has its parallel in some other age or in some other land. This concession shows that the great experiment in popular government is developing the vices which have disgraced the rule of aristocracies or of kings. Mr. Bryce himself, we venture to infer from passages in his book, goes far towards sharing the feeling that popular government in America cannot stand the test of any ideal standard. The eloquent but melancholy pages which close his work enumerate the grand historical crises at which the noblest of mankind have dreamed that an ideal has been reduced to practice, and have been rudely awakened to the consciousness that their dream had the unreality of a vision.

If the government and institutions of America are far removed from that ideal commonwealth which European philosophers imagined and which Americans expected to create, the disappointment caused by this fact appears to Mr. Bryce to be only the utterance of the ever-fresh surprise of man'kind at the discovery of their own weaknesses and shortcomings. Why,' he asks, should either philosophers in Europe or practical men in America have expected human 'nature to change when it crossed the ocean? Our author for once does injustice both to philosophy and to common sense. What rational men, we take it, have expected, or at least have hoped, is not that human nature should change, but that the experiment of popular government, when tried under favourable circumstances, some of which can never recur during the whole future of humanity, should turn out an undoubted if not a brilliant success, and should exhibit the best capacities of human nature in a new light.

This is the rational ideal by which the American Commonwealth may be tried. be tried. Providence has lavished on the people of the United States all its rarest favours; the original settlers were the choicest children of England, long trained by the practice of self-government at home' to carry out in another world all the best ideas derived from the laws and institutions of the freest country in the Old World. They were delivered at once from the load of inherited evils with which feudalism, despotism, and superstition have oppressed Europe. To them fell such a new start in the career of nations as history does not record to have fallen to the lot of any other race. They were set free, without any effort of their

own, from all the fears, the intrigues, and the rivalries which distract the policies of older States. The terror of foreign war or the burden of an armed peace has had no place, and need never have a place, on the other side of the Atlantic. To these spoilt children of Providence was assigned the all but unchecked dominion, not over a new country, but over a new world, and that a world nearly as unoccupied as it was untilled. To men thus happily situated it was also granted that their constitution should, under the guidance of a happy star, be moulded by the hands of statesmen of unrivalled skill in political architecture, who undertook their work just at the moment when statesmanship could profit both by the traditions of English experience and by the enlightenment and the humanity of the eighteenth century. Men might well expect that such a people, in such a country, governed by such institutions, should exhibit, not the realisation of a philosophic Utopia, but the actual working of a polity far nobler and better than any commonwealth which has hitherto existed among mankind. Who can say that this modest hope has been realised? A philosopher or a moralist need at any rate hardly be blamed if he puts down Mr. Bryce's book with a sigh; for the reader discovers that the net result of our author's friendly and honest criticism is that the government of the American Commonwealth is just a little better-a cynic might say, not so very much worse than the government of the best-ruled countries of Europe.

ART. IX.-1. La France du Centenaire. Par EDOUARD GOUMY. Paris: 1889.

2. La France en 1889. Par le Comte DE CHAUDORDY. Paris: 1889.

3. Le Suffrage Universel et le Régime Parlementaire. PAUL LAFFITTE. Paris: 1888.

Par

4. Etat de la France en 1789. Par PAUL BOITEAU. Paris: 1860.

s the later years of the century close around us, we are reminded by jubilees and anniversaries without number of not a few of the illustrious lives and memorable events which mark the epochs of modern history. It would seem as if the recurrence of a date, marked by an interval of a hundred years, evokes the spirit of the past to revisit the earth, and we recall the very scenes in which our forefathers played an active and conspicuous part. If this be an illusion, it is at least a touching and an instructive one. These dates are but the signals on the line. The progressive march of human history is direct, and it is immeasurable. The divisions of time are mere human artifices. The past is for ever past, and the world does not revolve, like the planets, through a centennial zodiac of events, repeating in one age the phenomena of those which preceded it. But the recurrence of such conventional periods invites us to measure the present state of the world by the standard of the past, and to consider the effects which the stupendous events of former centuries have had on the destinies of mankind. To relate or to describe, even in the most summary manner, the changes which have transformed the world from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, would be an undertaking far beyond the powers we can bring to such a task and the space we can allot to it. Our intention is much humbler, our object strictly limited. We shall confine ourselves to a passing allusion to one or two memorable events which the present centenary recalls, and we then propose to devote the remainder of this article to an attempt to estimate the effects, for good or for evil, of that revolution which, above all others, has made 1789 an era in the history of Europe and the state of France.

It was but the other day that the men of Plymouth and the national theatres in London ċelebrated the defeat of the great Armada in 1588, which crushed the maritime power