FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS OF POLITICS 285 



state and subject to government, not through their own deliberate 

 choice, but through an inexorable decree of their nature. The con- 

 stitution of a given political society is never to be found in any docu- 

 ment, however carefully framed and however solemnly proclaimed 

 as the fundamental law. The bond which truly unites and deter- 

 mines a people in their social and political life consists in the aggre- 

 gate of the numberless conventions and understandings through 

 which in the course of ages the varying relations and institutions of 

 the community have been developed and adapted to its greatest 

 convenience. In other words, and in the phrase which became 

 the distinguishing mark of a prevailing school of political philosophy, 

 - the state is not a mechanism, but an organism. There is, indeed, 

 a mystery in the state, but it is the mystery of all life and growth; 

 and the remedy for intolerable ills in the state, as in the individual, 

 is not the charlatan's panacea of death and resurrection, however 

 attractive and logical the prescription may appear, but the wise 

 physician's careful study of the history and character of the particu- 

 lar condition, followed by the removal of defects in this organ and in 

 that, without any pretense of touching the life principle itself. 



This general view was that on which the practical constitutionalism 

 of the first period of the century was worked out. It was the doc- 

 trine which the reforming Whigs in England applied, as against the 

 demand of Bentham and the Radicals for a remodeling of institu- 

 tions in accordance with their a priori scheme. It was the doctrine 

 which inspired the famous protest of Savigny against codifying and 

 thus assuming to stereotype German private law. It was the doc- 

 trine, finally, which is clearly revealed by an examination of the 

 content and working of the constitutions that resulted from the 

 agitations of the period we are discussing. These constitutions were, 

 indeed, written constitutions; but how different in character from 

 the type which had been conceived in the enthusiasm of the early 

 Revolution! In many cases the actual document announced itself 

 to be, not the deliberate expression of a people's will, signifying 

 their choice of government, but the grant of certain institutions by 

 a monarch to his subjects. Liberties were indeed guaranteed to the 

 man and the citizen, but rarely the sweeping immunities that had 

 figured in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. A representative 

 legislature was in every case provided for, but rarely so organized 

 as to interfere with the ancient domination of the aristocratic classes, 

 or endowed with such power as to insure the development of more 

 popular institutions. And above all, there very early appeared the 

 vexed question of the right of interpretation - - the question which 

 in the long run showed to every one that a written constitution 

 was not a remedy for all the ills that political life is heir to, but 

 merely a palliative for some particular evil conditions at some par- 



