marked off from the legislative body so strictly and with lines so rigid as in America. Nowhere in Europe is the constitution walled round with a rampart so difficult to modify as there. Nowhere in Europe is the executive so little able to lead the legislature, and the legislature so little able to control the executive. Alone of settled political systems, the de facto head of the administration cannot in America dissolve the legislature, nor can the legislature get rid of the de facto head of the administration, except by a two-thirds majority after a regular trial for a criminal offence. And a third element steps in when courts of law are empowered to pronounce that acts of the national legislature are unconstitutional and therefore invalid. This dualism of national government and State government, this tripartite division of authority into executive, legislative, and judicial, each more or less independent, runs through the whole fabric of the American polity and all its thirty-eight States. There are thus in America thirtynine constitutions, i.e., one national constitution and thirty-eight State constitutions; as many separate legislatures, as many executives, as many judiciaries, and, wonderful to relate, thirty-nine separate bodies of law. There are four kinds of American law, with four degrees of authority:

Perhaps the most striking and important contribution to political science which Mr. Bryce has made is the fundamental distinction which he pointed out between what he named the rigid constitutions and the flexible constitutions; America giving us the type of a practically rigid constitution, and England the type of a constitution, in theory at least, flexible without limit. Mr. Dicey, in his admirable lectures on the "Law of the Constitution," made all readers familiar with this distinction, and has illustrated it with great learning and acumen. But in his own account (p. 84) he refers to an unpublished lecture of Mr. Bryce, the substance of which is incorporated in the present work. The Parliament of the United Kingdom could extend, modify, or abolish the Constitution, or any part of it, by an ordinary act of Parliament passed in the same way as any Road or Inclosure Act. Nay, more, this power is being continually exercised session after session; for the Constitution seldom leaves off at the end of a session exactly as it stood at the opening of it. A court of law has only to satisfy itself as to the interpretation of an act of Parliament, and then to give effect to it. It cannot treat any act as unconstitutional, or see any degree of authority, of greater or less, in an act of Parliament.

Nor in England can any man say precisely what the Constitution is, or where it can be found. As Mr. Bryce says, it must be searched for in hundreds of volnals, and even memoirs. And of course umes, in cases, statutes, precedents, jour

much of it is even then matter for discussion. All is utterly different in America. The Federal Constitution and all its amendments are printed in a very precise document of sixteen octavo pages. It is so hedged round by securities against hasty alterations, that in the hundred years which now span the life of the Federa! Constitution, excepting in the postscript of its first year, and in a trivial amendment in 1794, and another in 1803, it has only been practically modified once - that is, after the tremendous civil war. The contrast between the rigid documentary Constitutions of America and the flexible traditional Constitution of England has been most profoundly grasped by Mr. Bryce, and most vividly illustrated and explained.

And courts of law, both State and national, are bound to decide under which of these four classes of law any given provision falls. Then the judiciary is bifurcated into the national courts and the State courts; each being subdivided locally into superior, middle, and inferior courts. And there is a national finance, as well as a State finance. And within each State, there is a system of local government and systems of municipal government, each with their own executive, their own constituents, their own council, and their own taxation. The double system of national and State constitutions, legislatures, executive, judiciaries, bodies of law, and separate finance, covers in a coordinate way every square mile of the vast American continent included in the States. Next to the contrast between these two There is here, it is obvious, the material types of constitutional systems, comes the for a curious complexity of forces, which equally striking contrast between the presindeed hardly any European has ade-idential administration of America and quately mastered.

the Cabinet administration of England. A

court of appeal, and the singular power of the great men who have adorned it, may almost be thought, even by an English lawyer, to take precedence in importance of all known tribunals.

Cabinet, as we understand it, is of course its unique position as the one central out of the question where the legislature neither controls nor depends upon a ministry. And where there is no legislature to make or unmake a ministry, there is of course no ministry to initiate, guide, or modify legislation. An American president is a prime minister whose business is to control the public departments, but not to interfere with the legislature. He has secretaries without collective responsibility, but no ministry. Ministers are not accountable to the legislature, nor are they jointly responsible for each other. So the legislature is a parliament with which the ministers are often in conflict, and which has no means whatever of removing them. All this Mr. Bryce explains and illustrates with a force and fertility which are only possible to a man who has had the advantage of experience in Parliament and in office, and who unites to the training of a constitutional lawyer great opportunities for careful study on the spot.

Mr. Bryce next explains the constitution, character, and working of that famous American institution the Senate, the relation of which to the executive is so puzzling to those who know only the dignified Upper Chambers of Europe, and which has a peculiar interest for those European politicians who find treaties and international relations ultimately referred to its final arbitrament. He then turns to the House of Representatives, a house how utterly unlike our House of Commons few will realize till they have mastered all that Mr. Bryce has to tell. His picture of the "House at work" is one of those vivid, clear-cut portraits which are only possible to a practical politician living his daily life in one school who has attentively watched another school and compared it with his own.

Mr. Bryce's account of the federal courts is one that could only be given by a lawyer, who, familiar with the machinery of English courts, and imbued with our own legal principles, has studied the American courts with all the assistance that can be given by his intimate relations with American lawyers, judges, and advocates, thus comparing professional impressions and experience. Nothing in the book is more interesting and valuable than his account of the history, constitution, and working of the famous Supreme Court of Washington, a court which, from the momentous national functions with which it is charged, its striking history,

That part of Mr. Bryce's book to which the English politician will most often turn will be, no doubt, the eleven chapters from the twenty-fifth to the thirty-fifth inclusive, wherein he compares the American and European systems, criticises the American Constitution, and explains the paradox how the most rapidly growing of modern peoples contrives to thrive under the most rigid of all known Constitutions, and the one which seems apparently the most prone to insoluble deadlocks. The problem is indeed one of the most curious and suggestive which can engage the student of politics and the practical politician. Mr. Bryce's solution of the mystery, which, like the solution of most mysteries, depends on complex allowances, compensations, and qualifications in practical result, is as full of accurate observation of fact as it is of sterling political good sense.

It would need an article even to state in full Mr. Bryce's explanation of the separate State system, of the relations of the States to the federal Union, of the distribution of the functions of government between the State and the Union, of the complex institutions by which the rela tions are distinguished and maintained. The co-ordination of national authority and thirty-eight State authorities is one of the most difficult and curious problems in the range of political science. European States are familiar enough with a local government and a national government. But in America, where both exist in full development, there is intercalated between them an antecedent State gov ernment which fulfils the great bulk of the functions possessed by the national government of these kingdoms, and habitually exercised by the House of Commons. Nor is this the whole of the anomaly, for in America each of the thirty-eight States, with distinct executives, legislatures, lawcourts, bodies of law and finance, are constitutionally safeguarded under very precise clauses in written instruments from any interference by the federal executive, or the federal legislature. us imagine the new county councils each having its own distinct, inviolable, and self-enacted Constitution, which no act of Parliament could modify, suspend, or add

Let

The rest of Mr. Bryce's work is devoted to explain the party system, and all the peculiar institutions to which the party system has given birth, the "machine, the "ring," the "boss," and the way the boss runs the machine; next to the working of public opinion, and all its various organs, the press, the "stump," the " caucus," the conventions, and the ballot. And he concludes with a large body of illustrations, reflections, criticisms, and suggestions.

ionist could detect whether the author be a follower of Mr. Gladstone or of Lord Hartington. True political science sits calmly aloof from party struggles.

The special strength of Mr. Bryce is this, that he is a rare example (one may almost say a unique example) of the constitutional jurist, who compares institutions and constitutions step by step with social habits and practical results visible on the spot. He refuses to consider the American Constitution or any single American institution apart from the habits and opinions of the American people who live under them, and the American politicians, The grand question which all will ask journalists, speakers, officials, managers, remains does Mr. Bryce write as a pan- and groups of men who work them, make egyrist of the American democracy, or as them, and want them. It is another ina critic of it? How does the judge sum stance of the golden rule that organs, or. up the evidence about the greatest exper-ganisms, and organic activity, are only to iment of free electoral government yet be truly understood as we study them in attempted by man? Mr. Bryce, one may their functions, and under the actual conanswer, has far too much experience of ditions of environment and adjustment to affairs, too much learning, too much polit- it, in which they do, as a fact, habitually ical sagacity, to sum up in any wholesale, function. trenchant, ex cathedra style, or to write One may doubt if such a living picture either a eulogium on democracy or an in- of democracy in all its ways, in its strength dictment of democracy. As a judge, as and its weakness, its dangers and its fua thinker should, he gives us ample mate- ture, in all its strange nakedness of aprial for forming our own judgment, exam-pearance, and its amazing vitality and ines all the difficulties and possibilities, force, in its golden hopes, and its simplicthe strength, the weakness, the compen-ity and limitations, as of a raw, lucky, sations, and the inconveniences of each institution in turn. No single vice or degeneration of the American polity is at all screened or palliated. A hostile satirist could find matter enough for a dozen philippics in the familiar style of the reactionary prophet of evil. A stalwart believer in democracy will find many a conclusion to deepen his faith and to fire his enthusiasm. Mr. Bryce, it is clear, sees many a compensating force which was unobserved by Sir H. Maine when he wrote on "Popular Government," and Mr. Bryce's knowledge of America vastly exceeds that of Maine. To compare their books on this point is to see all the gulf which separates an acute student of political literature from an experienced observer of political institutions.

Mr. Byrce writes as an observer of political institutions, not, be it said, as a party politician. The comparison of federal with the State legislatures bristles at every point with illustrations of the burning issue of our day, the relations of the imperial Parliament to a possible Home Rule legislature. The book of Mr. Bryce touches on the problem at every chapter. Yet there is not a sentence in these three volumes by which the most sensitive Un

inexperienced youth entering on a matchless inheritance for good or for evil, has ever yet been drawn by a competent hand. And it may be doubted even more if there yet exists for any country in the Old World a portrait so thoughtful, searching, and complete, so suggestive of the character, and with its life-history so graven on the face, as that which Mr. Bryce has now given us for the New World.

It is impossible to close this book without reflecting that it adds another fine cornerstone to the noble monument which the sons and teachers of Oxford have raised round the history and analysis of political institutions. Not only has Oxford taken for centuries a leading part in this field of social science, but it is not easy to recall a work of first-rate importance in this difficult department which has not come from those who have taught in Oxford, or have been trained by her in the school of Thucydides and Aristotle. The tradition of Sir T. More, of Raleigh, of Hobbes, of Locke, and Adam Smith has been worthily maintained. Clarendon opened a long succession of historians, through Gibbon, the greatest of historians, Henry Hallam, Doctor Arnold, Dean Milman, and so on down to the

474

great modern school of Bishop_Stubbs, | possible exception of Lord Byron. What Dr. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, J. R. Green, should we say now to his claim to this Froude, Goldwin Smith, Dean Stanley, high position, and what chance would he Cotter Morison, John Morley. Nor is it have of being placed in the same category less significant that so much of what we as Wordsworth or Coleridge, Shelley or know of the English Constitution has been Keats? While these poets, whose repuexpounded by those who have taught at tation could not compare with that of Oxford or who have been trained at Oxford. Campbell in the first quarter of the cenBlackstone's commentaries on the laws of tury, have steadily grown in favor, there England were lectures delivered by him are now few critics, I imagine, who would as professor at Oxford; so also were deny that the star of Campbell is on the those far more trustworthy commentaries, wane. He is still reckoned as a standard known as Dicey "On the Law of the Con-author, but it is only by a few of his short stitution," and Anson "On the Law of lyrics, and not by his didactic and narraParliament;" and so at least one of Sir H. Maine's studies on political institutions. To this long list of Oxford achievements we must now add the work of her Regius professor of civil law, a work dedicated to, and in part inspired by, two of his Oxford colleagues; and which will permanently hold its own in this splendid array of historical research and political philosophy.

From Temple Bar.

THOMAS CAMPBELL.

THE parable of Dives and Lazarus is one which has often been exemplified in the annals of poets. As in most periods of literature there are one or two outcast and neglected authors, who, lying at the gates of Parnassus, vainly crave admittance in their lifetime to that seat among the poetic brotherhood to which, when it is too late, a remorseful posterity is willing and eager to advance them; so, on the other hand, there are some poets on whom a superfluity of present popularity is lavished by the favor of their contemporaries, which is not destined to be confirmed at any rate to its full extent by the ultimate judgment of time. Many literary and critical verdicts have been reversed or modified in the last half-century, and at the present date we are able to see clearly enough that Campbell was one of those lucky (or should we rather say unlucky?) poets, who enjoy in their lifetime the "good things" of popular appreciation, though, under the enforcement of a severer and more prolonged test, they cannot maintain their supposed perpetuity of fame. From the publication of "Gertrude of Wyoming" in 1809, almost up to the date of his death in 1844, Campbell was regarded in literary circles and by the general public as the greatest English poet of the nineteenth century with the

tive poems, that he is likely to be ultimately remembered. To do Campbell justice, he himself seems to have felt that his popularity was out of proportion to his actual poetic qualities. "He alluded," we are told," with genuine simplicity to his own feelings, on receiving praise and honor as a poet: You did not do all this to Burns; you neglected him — a real geniusa wonder; and you bestow all this on me, who am nothing, compared to him." A study, at the present day, of Campbell's life and writings certainly tends to confirm the truth of this piece of self-criticism.

Thomas Campbell was born at Glasgow on July 27, 1777, being the youngest child of a family of eleven. His father, Alexander Campbell, already an old man of sixty-seven years of age, had been a wealthy Glasgow merchant; but, owing to the rupture of trade with Virginia on the outbreak of the American War of Independence, he had been lately reduced to a position of comparative poverty, and was compelled to live in a very frugal and simple manner. The birth of another son, after these reverses of fortune, was welcomed by both parents as a pledge of returning happiness; and the future poet, owing to his bright, winning disposition and precocious intellect, soon became the hope and pride of the family. His mother, a Scotchwoman of somewhat stern and rigid character, who brought up her chil dren with old-fashioned severity, is said to have relaxed much of her natural strictness in her treatment of her latest-born son. She was passionately fond of music, and would sing the old Scotch melodies with taste and feeling; so that Campbell from his very infancy was familiar with that style of ballad poetry which plays so great a part in his writings.

Little is known of Campbell's youthful

Beattie's Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, ii. 255.

days; for, in his communications with later friends, he was apt to be rather reticent about his boyhood. He was educated first at the Grammar School, then at the University of Glasgow; and at an early age distinguished himself by his proficiency in the classics, especially in his poetical translations from the Greek. So highly did he value, and over-value, these boyish prize-poems, that many years later he insisted on retaining them in a prominent position among his collected works - an error of judgment typical of the excessive importance attributed by him to all classical studies, to the exclusion or neglect of subjects of wider and more pressing interest. The lack of steady application, observable in Campbell's character even at this early period, should be noted as the secret of his failure to maintain his intellectual powers in after life. "He is reported," says one of his biographers, to have been, if not an idle boy - which from his progress would hardly be credible, though it is on record-yet one who would only learn by fits and starts, as he felt it congenial to his inclination; in fact, capable of anything under unfettered application. To one of his temperament mechanical routine was not congenial, if he might be judged of regarding his youth by his habits of study when

a man.

to study a new profession. Law I have abandoned; and my prospects of going abroad to my brothers will not do. If I find myself able to accomplish this view, I shall be happy; but my hopes are not sanguine. Much depends on my success with those most variable patrons, the Edinburgh booksellers. I have the prospect of employment with Mundell & Son, sufficient for this winter. Beyond that period I dare not hope. I am afraid I shall be forced to abandon the pursuit at present so near my heart, and again, as before, incur the censure of unsteadiness." He was, in fact, obliged to make yet ananother change, and to support himself once more by classical tuition, until at last a successful entry into the profession of literature was unexpectedly opened to him.

The origin of Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope " is possibly to be sought in a letter addressed to him when he was in Mull, in 1795, by one of his friends at Glasgow University. This friend, in order to cheer him in his loneliness, sent him some stanzas entitled "The Pleasures of Soli tude," with the following postscript: "We have now three 'Pleasures' by first rate men of genius, viz., 'The Pleasures of Imagination,' The Pleasures of Memory,' and The Pleasures of Solitude.' Let us cherish the pleasures of hope' that we At the age of seventeen, Campbell left may soon meet in Alma Mater!" The Glasgow University, and, his family being title thus humorously suggested was seristill in distressed circumstances, obtained ously accepted by Campbell, who shortly a tutorship in the isle of Mull, where, in afterwards commenced "The Pleasures of his spare hours, he studied the wild as- Hope," which he took with him in manupects of nature, and wrote, or projected, a script to Edinburgh in 1797. He already good deal of poetry. For two or three enjoyed a considerable reputation among years he thus supported himself by pri- his own circle of friends at Glasgow as vate teaching in Mull, Glasgow, and In- the writer of some brilliant poetical transverary; but his prospects were by no lations, and two of his early lyrics, "The means cheering at this time, and his spir- Wounded Hussar" (which had been sung its, as we see from his letters, were often as a ballad in the streets of Glasgow) and very depressed. In 1797 he determined the "The Dirge of Wallace," had shown to go to Edinburgh, to try his fortune in that he possessed other powers which law, physic, teaching, or literature; and might be turned to good account. He was here, when his position seemed likely to fortunate also in having made some powbecome so desperate that he was thinking erful friends in Edinburgh even before his of emigration, he succeeded in obtaining name was widely known; among these an introduction to Mr. Mundell, a pub were Jeffrey, Leyden, Thomas Brown, and lisher, who made him an offer of literary Dr. Anderson, author of the "Lives of work. This, however, was at first only the British Poets." By the influence of temporary, and Campbell seems still to Dr. Anderson, Mundell, the publisher, was have inclined to the adoption of the med-induced to purchase the copyright of ical profession. "You will think me "The Pleasures of Hope" for two hunchangeable," he wrote to a friend in the autumn of this year. "I am attempting

Redding's Literary Reminiscences of Thomas Campbell, ii. 9.

dred printed copies of the book, equivalent to a sum of fifty or sixty pounds; and on these terms the poem was issued in the spring of 1799, when Campbell was in his twenty-second year. A good deal of in