various governments of the world, but also treated with special fulness and particularity, with more attention to its historical basis, and with a wider survey of its details. If the British constitution is a standard of measurement to which we may refer, wholly or in part, the constitutions of so many other countries, we need not attempt, in dealing with it, to observe the same scale of proportion which is applied elsewhere.

A glance at the various governments which survive in the world at the present time reveals the important fact that few, if any, of the methods familiar to us in the pages of history are absent from the list. We have still the savage communities which involve rather an obliteration of family relationship than the existence of one large family; we have the somewhat better organized patriarchal forms; we have, again, the nomadic hordes and camp-nations, which at one moment graze their flocks and herds on the fringes of the desert, and at another threaten to overflow the world. In none of these is there any established government to which we need direct our attention; but amongst the organic States also the most ancient forms of human domination are still extant. Passing from the east of Asia to the west of Europe, we advance from theocracy to autocracy, and from autocracy to democracy, in a strangely regulated series, complete with nearly all the intervening links. The newer constitutional ideas, having their origin in the extreme west, have hitherto been unable to pierce the barrier of Russian and Turkish despotism. Baffled there, the effort has begun again at the eastern extremity of the line, and it has not been without success. It is true of Japan, if not yet of China, that western ideas of popular government have commended themselves to a

large section of the nation, and that their effect is already visible in the institutions of the country. The unimpressionable mass is the vast region which lies between the China seas and the western frontier of Russia, between the tropics and the northern limits of Asia. All the rest of the civilized world is permeated more or less thoroughly by the principle that the ultimate power of government rests with the people, to whom their rulers are responsible. The chief independent countries of the world, arranged on the basis of their nominal forms of government, are as follows:

The Kingdom and Empire of Great Britain

Empire of Austria-Hungary Empire of Brazil

The word "Federal" is used here in a limited sense, to denote States which, whatever their titular designation, include two or more distinct legislative governments, linked together by a constitution.

It is evident that the name alone of any particular government affords an imperfect guarantee of the manner in which that government is administered, and no guarantee at all of the spirit in which it is enforced. Citizens living under monarchical rule may be, and often are, more fortunately placed so far as the exercise of personal liberty is concerned than the citizens of a republic, though republican forms are based on the wider diffusion of liberty amongst all classes of the people. So much, indeed, does the value of any form of government depend upon the spirit of those who administer it, and of those who are subject to it, that one may enjoy more liberal conditions of life under an absolute autocracy-such as China or Madagascar—than, for instance, in sundry unsettled republics in South and Central America.

Theoretically, however, thirty-six out of the forty-four States just enumerated are under various forms of popular government, having representative institutions, and executives based upon contracts between the governing and the governed.

Recent history has shown that the general tendency in States which have secured settled and stable government, in which trade has been developed and international relations have been encouraged, has been towards the establishment of popular rights on a representative basis. The origin of the new constitutions is due to (1) the creation of entirely new States, as in the Canadian and Australian colonies of Great Britain; (2) the revolt and independent organization of colonies, as in the republics of America; (3) the liberation of old States from foreign control, as in the case of Greece-and to some extent in that of Italy; (4) internal revolution, in which the former rulers have

been overthrown, as in France; (5) revolution resulting in a compromise, as in Germany and Austria-Hungary; or (6) the gradual development of free institutions, as in Sweden and Norway.

The distinction between written constitutions, complete in themselves, though requiring addition or amendment from time to time, and developed constitutions, the result of a gradual consolidation of tested principles, is one of very considerable importance. It would, perhaps, be a lost labour to weigh against each other the advantages proper to such a written constitution as that of the United States, which has admirably served its purpose for more than a century, and those of the constitution which has slowly assumed shape and character in the British islands. Each in a different way has been accommodated to the wants of the people by and for whom it was constructed—the first as it were on a level and unoccupied site, the last on ancient foundations, and by the adaptation of old materials to a perfected plan. The success of both is due, not to the adoption of particular terms and provisions which could be applied equally well to any people, under any circumstances, but to the discrimination with which men of prudence and foresight, guided by experience, used appropriate methods to satisfy declared needs. In America the task was to expand and adjust a plan of government which the mother country had bestowed on her first adult offspring. In Britain there had been centuries of slow elaboration, during which charter upon charter, statute upon statute, innumerable precedents of law and custom, blended all that was good and durable in the old with all that was just and mature in the ideas of succeeding generations.

In every country, the constitution which works and endures is the constitution which grows out of, or readily takes root in, the character of the people, which is indicated in advance by the national bent, and in the making of which neither race, nor history, nor geographical position, nor political environment, nor climate, has been left out of consideration or failed to bear its part. The instances are numerous in which adopted constitutions have either languished or failed altogether, through the absence of one or more of these necessary conditions of success. The constitution of France has had an abnormally rapid growth, and cannot yet be said to have thrown off the inherent weakness due to the historical discontinuity in which it had its origin. The constitution of AustriaHungary has not existed long enough to warrant a firm belief in its durability. It has yet to undergo the severe ordeals which must of necessity arise out of the unstable political environments of the dual empire. The character and bent of the Danish people are clearly ill-accommodated by the constitution of the country as it is now formulated. or interpreted. The German people, though they are for the moment agreed to suspend the natural development of their constitutions, cannot without great danger prolong the violent distortion to which their military system subjects them. In America the separated fragments of Simon Bolivar's great conquests from Spain are one and all in the throes of national regeneration; and history has not set the seal of finality on any of the South American constitutions. Liberia is a standing witness to the impossibility of healthy growth in a plant capriciously removed to foreign soil and unsuitable conditions.

Britain, of all the colonizing nations of the world, has