It would be inaccurate, with Rousseau on the threshold, to say that his influence demolished the systems of political abstraction which, at their logical best, and in the most complete unreality, are to be found in Godwin's _Political Justice_; but it is not beyond the mark to affirm that after his time such abstract systems were on the defensive.

Therein, with all his faults, he had given Burke the clue to those truths he so profoundly saw--the sense of the State as more than a mechanical contrivance, the high regard for prescription, the sense of law as the voice of past wisdom.

He was, said Burke, "the greatest genius which has enlightened this age"; and Burke had every reason to utter that noble panegyric.

But Montesquieu was more than this.

He emphasized legislation as the main mechanism of social change; and therein he is the parent of that decisive reversal of past methods of which Bentham first revealed the true significance.