experiments in that system of universal suffrage which has been recently grafted upon the British Constitution, and in various offshoots and consequences of it which with more or less urgency are now pressed for adoption in this country. These experiments have not yet been carried on long enough to be conclusive in respect to their final success, but long enough, and in a field large enough, to be most instructive. No other new continent exists upon which they can ever be tried again under conditions so favorable. In those features of government the younger country is more mature than the older one. The child can teach the parent the new ways of life on which the parent has never or only recently entered. Selfgovernment is the common property and inheritance of both nations, though under different but fast assimilating forms, reposing upon the same substantial basis. The whole American fabric is founded, in the first instance, upon English constitutional principles, English institutions, and English law. All that is new is in the application and extension of them, in details and political machinery. What has been the working out of these principles by the English race, under new conditions and circumstances, and under different methods, is best to be studied in the light of American political history for the last hundred years, and in the condition of America to-day. And no man is fully qualified to deal with some of the recent problems and theories of British politics, who has not thoughtfully observed the solution of similar problems, and the practical outcome of like theories in the other country. It is in the result rather than in the a priori argument that their success or

failure is best seen, and where is most clearly pointed out the extent to which they may be safely adopted, the means by which they are to be made effectual, and the safeguards and restrictions with which they ought to be surrounded.

The scale, on which the experiment has been in force, is grand. A continent new to civilization, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; infinite in the variety and practically inexhaustible in the amount of its physical resources, natural wealth, and fertility; with an atmosphere at once healthful and stimulating, and a scenery so striking and noble as to be in itself an inspiration. In the early struggles for the possession of the country the dominant race prevailed, while the native population disappeared. Both the French and Spanish efforts at colonization ultimately perished, and only served in the end to illustrate the law of nature that bestows upon few nations the power of procreating other nations, and to still fewer the capacity to go down to the sea in ships. Streams of emigration from other races and from many other countries have steadily flowed into North America from the beginning, but, like the rivers that perpetually run into the sea without ever affecting the saltness of its waters, they have been assimilated as soon as received. Whatever a nationality is when it goes there, in the second or, at the most, in the third generation, all visible trace of its nativity is lost; it has taken on the character of the predominant stock, and has become, to all intents and purposes, Anglo-Saxon. There is no stronger proof of the innate toughness and vitality of that race than its power of absorbing

so largely all other races without losing its own native and distinctive qualities. If every inhabitant was direct in descent from the people of Great Britain, America would hardly be more Anglo-Saxon than it is, so far as all men born on its soil are concerned. England is to Americans the home of their ancestors. America is to Englishmen the creation of their children. Americans are what Englishmen have become by crossing the sea and occupying a new continent. Englishmen are what Americans would have been if they had remained at home.

Of the extraordinary material prosperity of the first century of American independence, its vast increase in population, in wealth, in industries, in physical achievements, and in popular intelligence, it is unnecessary to speak: they are conspicuous before the world. How far have these been the result of the system of government, and how far have they arisen in spite of it? How far are they the offspring of youth, boundless wealth, and almost limitless area, and how far of institutions? The nation has done much, but how? It has proved much, but what? It has set forth many things, but how many and what? And what is to be the future and the outcome? Is it to be the perpetuity of existing institutions or the establishment of new ones, better or worse? These are questions to be studied by Englishmen as well as by Americans, and to be looked at candidly and dispassionately. We are not to be so dazzled by great material success as blindly to adopt all the system that has accompanied it, as excellence that has been demonstrated by experience. Nor should we seize upon the defects, the mischiefs, the drawbacks that are to

be discovered, as being necessarily inseparable from the system and its dominant features, and so condemn the whole.

The Constitution of the United States, to which Mr. Bryce devotes his first volume, underlies the whole American theory of government. It is the fundamental and unchangeable law, to which all exercise of governmental authority in any department and for every purpose is subordinate, and must be made to conform. There is no power in Congress, nor in the President, nor in any State government, to disobey or to dispense with the requirements or limitations of the written instrument, from which all their powers are derived, and under which the fundamental rights of the citizen are protected. All governmental acts, legislative, executive, or judicial, must consist with it, or they are absolutely void. They may be lawfully resisted, and legal redress may be obtained for any injury they occasion. This is the first condition and characteristic of the American government, which Englishmen have to understand and to keep in view in the effort to comprehend it.

The written Constitution was a necessity to the American Republic, because it commenced by the federation of thirteen independent States, which, until the Revolutionary war, though colonies of Great Britain, had been as independent of each other, except in geographical propinquity, as Canada is of Australia. No such federation, nor any federation that would answer the purposes of modern government and the various and divers interests it has to deal with, could take place without two elements-a written and therefore an exact constitution, and a central

federal tribunal thereby created, in which the construction and effect of the Constitution should be finally determined, and its predominant authority insured.

Mr. Bryce seems to think this assumption unnecessary, and instances the case of the Achæan league, formed without any written constitution. But he has evidently not considered this point as carefully as he has most of those he treats, or he would probably have reached a different conclusion. Forms and details of institutions may be numberless, but there are certain principles of government that will be found to underlie them all, with the same certainty with which the fundamental laws of mechanics control the operations of machinery, however elaborate and ingenious. A league offensive or defensive might be formed between States otherwise independent, which should have certain general purposes in an imperfect way. Such was the Confederation of the American States before the adoption of the Constitution, an arrangement resting upon mere agreement, destitute of permanence beyond the assent of the parties, and without means of asserting its control over either. But the federation of independent and equal States into one nation, which shall be strong enough for the purposes of modern government, which shall secure to the national organization all the powers which its maintenance requires, and still leave unimpaired in the several States the sovereignty it does not require, is a much larger, more complex, and more difficult problem, and not to be accomplished without a written constitution, comprehensive, exact, and felicitous in its terms, and sagacious in its provisions.