RELATIVE EQUALITY TO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION. 559 



resort to the philosophical method, we speedily become aware, that however 

 cautious may be our application of it, fifty, or five hundred accidents may 

 occur, which will so impede the action of necessary causes, as to render them, in 

 a given place or for a given time, wholly inoperative. But it is a mistake to sup- 

 pose that social differ altogether from physical problems in the presence of these 

 disturbing elements, or that the separation of the accidental from the necessary is 

 impossible in the one case more than in the other. We say, for example, 

 that a wall will not stand if it is cracked, or that a body will fall if a vertical 

 line through its centre of gravity falls without its base. But there are 

 many cracked walls in this city that are very old ; and the hanging tower of Pisa 

 has stood for more than six centuries. It is nearly as old as the British 

 Constitution, and, judging by present appearances, is, I fear, very likely to survive 

 it. Such exceptions, of course, invalidate the rule only to the extent of showing, 

 that cracked walls, or hanging walls, may stand for centuries. They reduce the 

 presumption that such walls will tumble down within a given period to a proba- 

 bility ; but they do not prevent us from distinguishing between the principles of 

 physics, which ultimately condemn them, and the physical accidents which hold 

 them up for a time. In the same way, though a social institution violates a 

 principle which it cannot abrogate, or ignores a fact which it cannot alter; we 

 must not on that account pronounce its temporary realisation to be impossible, 

 or predict its immediate miscarriage. But, so far from believing in its perma- 

 nent stability, if we know that the accidents on which it leans are transitory, and 

 that the laws which it violates are unchangeable, if it does not right itself scien- 

 tifically we may predict its practical downfall, with a confidence bordering very 

 closely on certainty. On the other hand, if a projected institution cannot be shown 

 to violate any such principle, or to assume as facts of nature what are not facts 

 of nature, then there is scarcely any amount of past failure, or present difficulty, 

 which will entitle us to exclude it from the category of attainable objects. The 

 failures, for anything that appears, may have been accidents ; and if we venture 

 to condemn it on the strength of them, or to apply to it any of those epithets 

 behind which ignorance and mental indolence are so eager to take shelter, we run 

 the risk of encountering the ridicule which its ultimate success will not fail to 

 bring down on us. 



Political Methodology, viewed as a branch of applied logic, has risen in the 

 hands of some of its recent cultivators almost to the dignity of a separate science. 

 By eliminating impossible schemes, and thus circumscribing the sphere of political 

 effort, it has already given evidence of its practical value for the generations that 

 are to follow us, if not for that to which we belong. Within the State forms of 

 government, after which the vulgar still aspire as the ideal forms of society, have 

 been shown by its means to be permanently irreconcileable with order, and if with 

 order, then with liberty, which is possible only through order, and so ultimately 



