HISTORICAL METHOD. 521 



common inconvenience by severing the connexion. How 

 strong this feeling was in those ancient commonwealths 

 which attained any durable greatness, every one knows. 

 How happily Rome, in spite of all her tyranny, succeeded in 

 establishing the feeling of a common country among the 

 provinces of her vast and divided empire, will appear when 

 any one who has given due attention to the subject shall take 

 the trouble to point it out. In modern times the countries 

 which have had that feeling in the strongest degree have been 

 the most powerful countries ; England, France, and, in pro- 

 portion to their territory and resources, Holland and Switzer- 

 land ; while England in her connexion with Ireland, is one of 

 the most signal examples of the consequences of its absence. 

 Every Italian knows why Italy is under a foreign yoke ; every 

 German knows what maintains despotism in the Austrian 

 empire ; the evils of Spain flow as much from the absence of 

 nationality among the Spaniards themselves, as from the pre- 

 sence of it in their relations with foreigners : while the com- 

 pletest illustration of all is afforded by the republics of South 

 America, where the parts of one and the same state adhere so 

 slightly together, that no sooner does any province think itself 

 aggrieved by the general government than it proclaims itself a 

 separate nation." 



6. While the derivative laws of social statics are 

 ascertained by analysing different states of society, and 

 comparing them with one another, without regard to the 

 order of their succession ; the consideration of the successive 

 order is, on the contrary, predominant in the study of social 

 dynamics, of which the aim is to observe and explain the 

 sequences of social conditions. This branch of the social 

 science would be as complete as it can be made, if every one 

 of the leading general circumstances of each generation were 

 traced to its causes in the generation immediately preceding. 

 But the consensus is so complete, (especially in modern his- 

 tory,) that in the filiation of one generation and another, it is 

 the whole which produces the whole, rather than any part 

 a part. Little progress, therefore, can be made in esta- 



