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or refinement. The great point is to ensure a free, an authoritative, and an uninterrupted communication between the ostensible administrators of the national power, and its actual constituents and depositaries; and the chief distinction between a good and a bad government consists in the degree in which it affords the means of such a communication. The main end of government, to be sure, is, that wise laws should be enacted and enforced; but such is the condition of human infirmity, that the hazard of sanguinary contentions about the exercise of power is a much greater and more imminent evil than a considerable obstruction in the making or execution of the laws; and the best government, therefore, is not that which promises to make the best laws, and to enforce them most rigorously, but that which guards best against the tremendous conflicts to which all administrations of government, and all exercise of political power, are so apt to give rise. It happens fortunately, indeed, that the same arrangements which most effectually ensure the peace of society against those disorders, are also, on the whole, the best calculated for the purposes of wise and efficient legislation. But we do not hesitate to look upon the negative or preventive virtues as of a far higher cast than their positive and active ones; and to consider a representative legislature as incomparably of more value when it truly enables the efficient force of the nation to control and direct the executive, than when it merely enacts wholesome statutes in its legislative capacity." -Review of Leckie's Essay on Government, written in 1812: see Contributions, vol. iii.

Such is Jeffrey's version of the Whig principle in politics, and there is no principle more frequently reiterated in his writings. Again and again he recurs to it, sometimes expounding it formally, as above, sometimes incidentally referring to it, but always in such a way as to shew the supreme value in which he held it. That in every community there is a class holding the real and substantial power, whoever may be the person or persons in official authority, and on whatever supposed tenure they exercise that authority; that the extent of this class, its proportion to the whole community, as well as its character and composition, varies with the degree of civilisation to which the community has attained; that, in every case, the appropriate constitution is that set of devices which shall bring the opinion of the class who have the power most directly and surely to bear upon those who are in authority; that in England, and other similarly situated countries, where the class who have the power are numerous, and composed of very various elements, the best set of devices for the purpose in question consists in what is called Parliamentary or Representative government; that probably this is the ultimate kind of government attainable by civilized men; and that, in England, therefore, the proper course to be adopted by political reformers is neither, on the one hand, to quarrel with

this form of government, out of any theoretical preference for the supposed social energy of an absolute executive, nor, on the other, to attack the existing executive form of a Limited Hereditary Monarchy, out of any theoretical preference for the greater logical simplicity of Republicanism, but to keep up continually the play and stroke of the real power upon the recognised executive, by at once and immediately admitting to a share in the representation any new ingredient of real power that time or education may develop, nay, even to foster in the community every tendency to such an extension of the real power throughout the mass of the hitherto unfranchised,-such, stated in the most general terms, was the theory of Whiggism, as propounded by Jeffrey, and as disseminated by his influence through Scotland and England.

Now, of the speculative merit of such a reproduction of the Whig theory there can be but one opinion. Jeffrey here, we believe, did a real feat of Scottish generalization, and assisted political thought for ever by the lucid expression of one stage of it. And in what stead this cardinal notion stood to Jeffrey himself, what clearness and unity of purpose it gave to all his subordinate speculations in social matters, may be seen by a reference to his numerous political and historical sketches. Farther than this, too, it cannot be denied that the notion, in his hands and in those of his Whig associates and disciples, did immense public service. Permeating the whole body of British society, it dissolved and disintegrated much of the remaining national Toryism; and as all the great political achievements of the Whig party, during the generation preceding the presentthe Catholic Emancipation, the Abolition of Colonial Slavery, Economical Retrenchment, and the Reform Bill, were logical consequences of the Whig principle in the whole, so they were, doubtless, accelerated by this modification of it. If, however, we lift up the speculation itself by its roots, and examine how far it is a permanent and all-sufficing generalization in political science, we shall feel that it leaves us still in that condition of mere progress towards a final truth, which our Yankee friends describe by the term "seekers." It might be shewn, and Jeffrey himself had a glimpse of the fact, that the whole speculation proceeds on the view that government is based on a negation. The historical origin of government, according to Jeffrey, was precisely this, that, in early communities, strong and often unscrupulous individuals grasped at the supreme power, and that the other powerful men in the community made the best terms they could with these individuals, that is, struggled in a rude way to subject the inevitable one authority to the existing multiform power. Now, whatever truth there may be in this asser

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tion, considered as a fact in the natural history of government, it is clear that, unless something be postulated over the factsome divine law ordaining and inhering in the fact, however it happened some a priori necessity for the human race of government as such-then all government, from first to last, resolves itself into nothing more than the neutralization of one thing by another thing; of usurpation, direct or inherited, by organized resistance. Jeffrey, we think, would not have accepted this as his belief, if it had been nakedly proposed to him; but that the germs of such a belief lay in his political creed, may be inferred from his explicit statement in the foregoing passage, that he considered the merits of Parliamentary government to consist far less in its energy as an instrumentality for initiating wholesome positive laws, (in which respect, he admits, some have maintained its inferiority to Despotism,) than in its negative virtues as a means of enabling the scattered power of the nation to control its centralized executive. At all events, the belief we mention is the actual conclusion in which those who have carried out Jeffrey's principles to their logical extreme have at length ended. That all government is but an elaborate negation of the right to govern, a complicated equation the result of which is zero, a mere organized system of interferences to neutralize previous interferences; and that, consequently, the whole tendency of civilisation is to abolish Government, and to bring society to that state in which all men and women shall be so many independent selfgoverned atoms, and society itself a mere aggregate of such— this is the theory now creeping into vogue. Now for such as adopt this theory, Whiggism, whether as expounded by Jeffrey or by any one else, is evidently too narrow. Political duty, according to them, consists in speeding on the great consummation of No-government to which all things tend; and they are inclined to hold that the way to this is not so much through any rigorous or professed constitutionalism, as through the intervening term of democracy, or even a succession of mutually weakening struggles between democracy and despotism. Against all this another class of thinkers protest. Caring little for researches into the primeval origin of Governments, and assuming that inthe modifications which Government has undergone as to form since the days of the Nimrods and the Nebuchadnezzars down to those of the Peels and the Polks, there has doubtless, as everywhere else, been a law of evolution at work, they hold that Government itself is an imperishable necessity of social existence, a specific mode or forthgoing of human energy in the associated state. They hold that society itself has a life and activity, distinct from the lives and activities of the individuals which compose it, involving these but not logically reducible into these;

and the manifestations of this general social life they regard as things of supreme import-as, in fact, the acts of the human race as such. Governments of all forms, accordingly, they regard as the organs of volition and expression belonging to this higher life of society, the organs whose business it specially is to cogitate at every moment what new step society shall take, what new condition it shall impose upon itself with a view to some end. Hence, instead of preferring those Governments whose excellence is chiefly negative, they are disposed to prefer those which, from their nature, abound most in positive energy-which are the readiest to seize good notions of all kinds, shape them into laws and institutions, and so work them fast up into the condition. and circumstances of the people. As to the precise form of Government that would do this best, they are, however, all at sea. It may be asserted that here again, however, there is a manifest tendency to burst the walls of constitutional Whiggism. Jeffrey, indeed, persuaded himself that the form of Government which he preferred for its negative merits might also be shown to be the best in respect of sound legislative energy. But, as the sight becomes more frequent of that wreck of bills which the recess of every Parliamentary session leaves floating up and down in the public limbo, one or two small measures perhaps having been the sole product of many months-the persons in question begin to despair and to look about for new possibilities. Some, as we know, fell back upon the resolute moral desire as a refuge from the intellectual confusion; and, wishing vehemently for a wise despotism, would almost tolerate a despotism never so foolish. Others, applying themselves with a more sanguine faith to the problem of achieving the desired end without retrogression, scheme out a kind of theocratic democracy of the future, in which peoples, while governing themselves, shall be constantly pervaded by an inventive social energy, and shall to some extent commit the articulate expression of that energy to special social functionaries.

But though men may roam in deserts they must live in houses; and there are many who, though quite competent to such excursions into the regions of the intellectually extreme in politics, and even accustomed to them, still, feeling the necessity of having a roof above their heads against the wind and weather of present fact, return contentedly after every excursion to the comforts of homely Whiggism. Jeffrey himself, as his writings show, had now and then, notwithstanding his practical fidelity to this creed, occasional doubts, and wanderings, and surmises. Towards the end of his life, in particular, it seems to have been with a dazzled and hesitating eye that he looked forward into the increasing ghastliness of the European future. It is indeed

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a thought-distracting, theory-upsetting, sorrow-inflicting, consistency-killing element-this element of politics and political speculation! Nowhere are fools more dogmatic, nowhere are wise men more sad and silent; nowhere are wise men and fools, folly and wisdom, commingled and confounded more inextricably. Flashes of light through firmaments of darkness; a few strong instinctive convictions, a few leading doctrinal generalities, struggling with a chaos of facts which they cannot organizesuch is now the science of politics. The sun may yet shine, and truth and certainty lay claim to this region too; meanwhile men must grope. Hence again we say, it were well if men, without giving themselves political names at all, or at least without setting much store by these names, could consent to view each case as it occurred in the light of its own immediate merits -a so-called Whig now and then, for example, saying a word for what is beautiful in the antique; and a so-called Tory blowing the blast which is to dethrone a tyrant Bomba. Perhaps something of this immediate sensitiveness to right and wrong in themselves, rather than any respect for the Horatian maxim, "in medio tutissimus," has been the secret of that moderation of opinion which has distinguished most genial and sagacious men who have been obliged to take part in politics-the moderate Whiggism of a Jeffrey, on the one hand; on the other, the moderate Toryism of a Scott. For modern use, indeed, one would be inclined to supplement the Horatian maxim, thus:—In medio tutissimus ibis; in omnibus tamen rectius ages, si et extrema mediteris.

It is like passing from the smoke and din of the town to the pure air and quietness of the country to pass from Jeffrey in his connexion with politics, to Jeffrey in his connexion with literature. Here too, we have to note as the first fact with respect to the influence which was exercised, in the person of Jeffrey, over the judgment and the feelings of Britain generally, that that influence, whether favourable or not, was Scottish. As the successive modifications of Whig doctrine during the first thirty years of this century emanated from Edinburgh, so, from the same place, and, in the pages of the same periodical, there issued a more regular, more rapid, more consistent, and more influential series of criticisms on the works of contemporary British authors than from any other place in Great Britain. The Quarterly and other Reviews might, in some respects, contest the palm with the Edinburgh, in point of literary excellence and ability during the period in question, though even on this head there might be some doubts; but as a critical organ, as a recognised authority in the literary republic for whose quarterly judgments on new books readers waited with interest and authors with trembling, the Edinburgh had no com

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