■WILLIAM AND MARY.

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should absolutely rely on the proposition which he finds intreatises on Dynamics, and should make no allowance for the ■imperfection of his materials, his whole apparatus of beams,wheels, and ropes would soon come down in ruin, and, with allhis geometrical skill, he would be found a far inferior builder tothose painted barbarians who, though they never heard of theparallelogram of forces, managed to pile up Stonehenge.What the engineer is to the mathematician, the active states-man is to the contemplative statesman. It is indeed most im-portant that legislators and administrators should be versed inthe philosophy of government, as it is most important that thearchitect, who has to fix an obelisk on its pedestal, or to hanga tubular bridge over an estuary, should be versed in the philo-sophy of equilibrium and motion. But, as he who has actuallyto build must bear in mind many things never noticed byD’Alembert and Euler, so must he who has actually to governbe perpetually guided by considerations to which no allusioncan be found in the writings of Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham.The perfect lawgiver is a just temper between the mere man oftheory, who can see nothing but general principles, and themere man of business, who can see nothing but particular cir-cumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative element hasprevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world has duringthe last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their wisdomEurope and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions,scores of constitutions which have lived just long enough tomake a miserable noise, and have then gone off in convulsions.But in the English legislature the practical element has alwayspredominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over thespeculative. To think nothing of symmetry and much of con-venience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it isan anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance isfelt; never to innovate except so far as to get rid of the

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