Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought.

The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English institutions.

Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom.

The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure.

The liberty of unlicensed printing--less admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement.