NATURE AND LIMITS OF SCIENCE OF POLITICS. 725 



usually demand modification in view of the circumstances of the 

 people and of the day, but that the greatest allowance must always be 

 made in all political reforms for the influence of fixed sentiments and 

 habits. It also may happen that bad institutions such as a bad poor- 

 law system, or, in the criminal law, a falsely-conceived relationship 

 between crimes and punishments may have generated a vast and 

 complex web of affiliated ideas, customs, institutions, and laws, which 

 can severally be neither defended in principle nor yet rudely disdained 

 and cast aside. 



For not only do custom and habit enable a peojile, or classes of a 

 people, to work in long-established grooves with the smallest amount 

 of friction and obstruction, but the mere fact of the long existence 

 of a familiar usage so far fashions in its own image the mind and even 

 the conscience of a people that a critical reformer has a hard and un- 

 popular task to perform in assaulting even the most indefensible 

 abuses. The large mass of the people, if disused to political change 

 of any but the most cautious, slow, and tentative kind, have their sen- 

 timents of loyalty and reverence outraged by the sudden introduction 

 of what is new and unfamiliar. Their mind has been trained and 

 pruned in such a way as to be unable to conceive, as a mere intel- 

 lectual notion, a better ordered world than that in which they live. 

 Where too great a disparity, both in sentiments and in intellect, exists 

 between the reformer and the people, or even between different classes 

 of the people *in the same community, it may show that the times are 

 not yet ripe for changes recommended by deference to the claims of 

 logic and of justice. 



Instances in point are supplied by the difficulties experienced by 

 the British Indian Government in dealing with such patently immoral 

 institutions as polygamy ; by the attachment of the Scotch to a law 

 of marriage which notoriously facilitates the most cruel of frauds ; 

 and by the obstacles in all countries to any comprehensive reconstruc- 

 tion of the systems of land-tenure and inheritance, and of civil, and 

 still more of criminal, procedure. These last-mentioned institutions 

 have seldom been radically altered in any country by any process short 

 of revolution, however persuasive the voice of right, of reason, and of 

 utility, in favor of change. So vast is the number of individual per- 

 sons interested in these classes of matters, so well habituated are they, 

 and consequently so deeply attached, to the recognized forms, usages, 

 or even gestures, customarily in use many of which are of a public 

 nature and are daily witnessed by all men that any vital reconstruc- 

 tion seems little short of sacrilege, and the most conclusive reasons in 

 favor of it are scarcely comprehensible. 



3. It is needless to point out that the conception of Politics as a 

 Science is much affected by the imperfections of Politics as a practical 

 Art. It is not only by reason of the existence of ineradicable institu- 

 tions and ideas that the scientific development of political studies is 



