Page:Montesquieu.djvu/17

Rh to English books, persons and things which are scattered up and down his recently published Pensées. But we know that he attended some exciting debates in Parliament, and we know also how profoundly his study of English institutions influenced the Spirit of Laws.

On the preparation for that great work Montesquieu was engaged for the next seventeen years of his life. In 1734 appeared the Considerations on the Greatness and Decay of the Romans, which might be treated as a first instalment of its contents. Machiavelli had treated Roman history from the point of view of a practical statesman, and had used it as a storehouse of warnings and examples for the guidance of an Italian prince. 'Chance,' he said, 'leaves great room for prudence in shaping the course of events.' Bossuet wrote as a theologian, and sought for evidence of 'the secret judgements of God on the Roman empire.' Montesquieu wrote as a political philosopher, and tried to find in the history of a particular state the application of certain broad general principles. 'It is not fortune that rules the world. There are general causes, moral or physical, on which the rise, the stability, the fall of governments depend. If a state is ruined by the chance of a single battle, that is to say by a particular event, the possibility of its being so ruined arises from some general cause, and it is for these causes that the historian should seek.' In this short treatise Montesquieu's style perhaps reaches its highest level. He is not distracted by a multiplicity of topics; the greatness, dignity and unity of his subject give force, character, and continuity to his style. His sentences march like a Roman legion.

'The work of twenty years.' So Montesquieu describes the Spirit of Laws, counting in his three years