To find the best form of
government; to persuade others that it is the best; and having done
so, to stir them up to insist on having it, is the order of ideas in
the minds of those who adopt this view of political philosophy. They
look upon a constitution in the same light (difference of scale
being allowed for) as they would upon a steam plough, or a threshing
machine.
To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who
are so far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that
they regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of
government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According
to them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must
take them, in the main, as we find them. Governments cannot be
constructed by premeditated design. They "are not made, but grow." Our
business with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to
acquaint ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt
ourselves to them. The fundamental political institutions of a
people are considered by this school as a sort of organic growth
from the nature and life of that people: a product of their habits,
instincts, and unconscious wants and desires, scarcely at all of their
deliberate purposes. Their will has had no part in the matter but that
of meeting the necessities of the moment by the contrivances of the
moment, which contrivances, if in sufficient conformity to the
national feelings and character, commonly last, and by successive
aggregation constitute a polity, suited to the people who possess
it, but which it would be vain to attempt to superduce upon any people
whose nature and circumstances had not spontaneously evolved it.
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