556 CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 



Apart from this skepticism, the development of the science of 

 constitutional law was prejudiced by the smaller part left to the 

 human will in the political determination of the states and the lessons 

 with which the greatest masters of modern thought have imbued 

 minds agitated by doubt. The French Revolution had .spread the 

 conviction that the constitution of the state may be essentially the 

 production of individual free will, and the peaceful and marvelous 

 development of the United States has proved with what restrictions 

 that doctrine must be accepted. 



Against those bold pretensions of our science, believing to be 

 able to regulate the destinies of society, the standard was everywhere 

 raised; the theocratic school showed the influence of the divine 

 in the constitutions; * positivism limited the action of science to 

 the recognition and to the application of natural laws which are 

 governing the destinies of society; 2 determinism and evolutionism, 

 pretending to give the same form of social development, have ruined 

 even more the conscience of liberty, teaching that the best result 

 of constitutional science is to embrace the aggregate, heterogeneous 

 vote of the human race so that ; t may be seen that every social party 

 and every period of its existence is determined on the one hand by 

 its contenders, on the other hand by past and present actions that 

 other parties are exercising over it. 3 



Even without being skeptic or fatalist, we are obliged to recognize 

 the danger coming to science from this kind of universal conviction, 

 not to be able to find anything better than representative govern- 

 ment in its twofold form of presidential or cabinet government, with 

 a more or less direct intervention of people in the legislation. After 

 having little by little or with the violence of the revolutions broken 

 the chains of all tyrannies, advanced humanity found in the repre- 

 sentative democracy the delivering political form in which it will 

 be able to develop freely its forces and its activity. Ippolite Passy 

 and Stuart Mill, Thomas Cooley and Bigelow, Webster and Hosmer 

 have kept alive too much this political optimism, so that the cries 

 of alarm of David Syme and of Seaman, showing the vices of the 

 republic, are not able to trouble it as much as those of Charles Benoist, 

 alarmed by the crisis of the modern state and those of our numerous 

 critics of parliamentary government. 



Constitutional law is also neglected because the political fever 

 agitating Europe during almost a century has left the place to the 

 economical excitement, so that the dominant preoccupation is not 

 liberty and justice, but welfare and the research of fortune. To 

 reach the supreme degree of production and of consummation, 



1 De Maistre, X., Essai sur le principe gtncrateur des constitutions. 



2 A. Comte, Littre', and other positivists. 



3 Spencer, H., Sociology, vol. i, p. 590; Taine, H., L'ancicn regime, Preface, and 

 passim. 



