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. 7, 1861.] to us now, we must not judge him as if he had lived among responsible sovereigns and a free people.

The world was in a very different state when Montesquieu opened a new period (if, indeed, it was not the first period) of Political Philosophy. There was not much freedom existing anywhere so as to afford a study of various institutions, and his merit was not that of discovering principles from a wide range of facts. The time for that process had not arrived. But Montesquieu was the first to show mankind that the phenomena of political life, like all other phenomena, are subject to invariable laws. This is the great truth which brings after it all other political truth and wisdom. When it is fully understood everywhere, it will deprive self-willed tyrants of their hope and confidence, and it will create hope and confidence in the hearts and minds of nations. Up to Montesquieu’s time, one or another politician had expressed some idea of society making progress; but no one could give a reason for the notion; and there was incessant dispute about the fact. When the philosopher had shown that after some things had happened others could not but happen, and from these others again, and that nothing had ever been known to happen otherwise than through some necessary conditions, people regarded the political world in quite a new light. Nations were no longer at the mercy of despots, if any desire of freedom was alive in them; and any people might obtain freedom by seeking it in a sensible way. The same truth taught them how to learn the sensible way, and to satisfy themselves as to their own qualifications for conducting a good system. But the nation to which Montesquieu belonged did not understand him, and a century after his birth they were throwing away blessings which they were not yet wise enough to enjoy. Their own philosopher could have taught them that; but he was, perhaps, the only great Frenchman whom his countrymen have failed to be proud of.

He was born in 1689. It will strike the reader that precisely a hundred years later is the date of the political code of principles which won all good hearts to the first French revolution, and which wise statesmen and philosophers still regard as the noblest political creed yet professed in the world. This is quite true. Montesquieu’s countrymen did make such a proclamation a century after his death: but they were unfit for acting up to it, and they have never proved themselves worthy of it to this day. But if their great philosopher has not done much for them, he has for other peoples, and for the understanding of the human race at large. He proved that politics are a science, and that political life is naturally progressive. His “Spirit of Laws” is considered one of the three or four books which have educated the mind of Europe, within a century and a half, to a higher point than all other intellectual influences whatever. One of the others is Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” which illustrates the steady operation of the natural laws which Montesquieu first pointed out in the province of politics. Montesquieu could not apply those laws to the explanation of facts. He had not got far enough for that: but Adam Smith could do that in the economical department of politics; and France has yielded political writers abundantly able to use the great truth that Montesquieu disclosed.

He was of an old and noble family whose estates were near Bordeaux, and who had filled offices in the magistracy and in the local parliament for many generations. Charles, the philosopher, had an extraordinary taste for jurisprudence, in his very childhood, and his father believed he would be a great magistrate, in one way or another. He read the classics, and all voyages and travels that he could get hold of; but his pleasure in them was greatest when he could learn from them something about the laws of different lawgivers and nations. He was incessantly studying the contradictions, and discovering the objects of the obscurest laws, and preparing himself for a great position in the Bordeaux parliament first, and for a higher function afterwards. He filled some local political and judicial posts when he was between twenty and thirty: and when he was thirty-two he took the world by surprise with his “Persian Letters.” Some persons still prefer that work to any other of his; but we have here to do with his “Spirit of Laws,” which cost him fourteen years of thought and pains, after his “Persian Letters” had given him a great reputation.

The “Persian Letters” contained abundance of sarcasm on the hollow glories of the reign of Louis XIV., which had just closed, and plenty of satire on the social vices which such a reign encourages; but they manifested also a faith in the triumph of reason and right, an admiration for popular liberty, and a hearty concern for the best interests of society which prepared the mind of the few thoughtful readers, among the multitude who devoured the book, for what at length followed. One result of its popularity was that it decided its author to retire from his judicial office, and devote himself to study and writing. He quizzed the booksellers who, he declared, went about pulling by the sleeve every likely man they met with the petition, “Do write some Persian Letters for us;” but the popularity itself was no joke to him, as it altered the course of his life. He showed, in a noble discourse before the parliament of Bordeaux, what he conceived to be the functions of the Bar and the Bench; and he was not satisfied with his own discharge of them. His eyes served him so ill that he could neither write nor read notes with any facility. He could not take the trouble to correct his broad provincial dialect. He was of a rather lumbering habit of thought, though quick and gay in wit and humour; and he was so shy that, as he said, the mere feeling that anybody was listening to him put to flight all his ideas, tied his tongue, jumbled his words, and clouded his faculties, so that the very subject he had to speak upon vanished from his mind’s eye. If all this was true, he was certainly not made to be a judge, and was wise to sell the place, as such offices were a matter of purchase and sale in those days. He sought a seat in the Academy, on devoting himself to a student life; but certain priests protested against the admission of a satirist who had jested