are the most ruinous and oppressive to their provinces"; that republics are more favorable to science, monarchies to art; that the death of a political body is inevitable; would none of them, probably, be accepted by most thinkers at the present time.

And when he constructs an ideal constitution, irrespective of time and place, which is to be regarded as practical because it resembles that of Holland, it is obvious that the historical method had not yet come fully into being.
Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.
He has a keen eye for the absurdity of Pope's maxim that administration is all in all; nothing can ever make the forms of government immaterial.
He accepts Harrington's dictum that the substance of government corresponds to the distribution of property, without making it, as later thinkers have done, the foundation of all political forces.

He sees that the Crown cannot influence the mass of men, or withstand the new balance of property in the State; a prophecy of which the accuracy was demonstrated by the failure of George III.

"In all governments," as he says, "there is a perpetual intestinal struggle, open or secret," between Authority and Liberty; though his judgment that neither "can ever absolutely prevail," shows us rather that we are on the threshold of _laissez-faire_ than that Hume really understood the problem of freedom.

He realized that the House of Commons had become the pivot of the State; though he looked with dread upon the onset of popular government.