It is, when the last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint.

That it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been made.

The evil that men do lives after them; and few doctrines have been more noxious in their consequence than this theory of checks and balances.

But Blackstone's _Commentaries_ (1765-9) produced Bentham's _Fragment on Government_ (1776), and with that book we enter upon the realistic study of the British Constitution.
Rousseau is in an antithetic tradition; but just as he drew from English thinkers so did he exercise upon the next generation an influence the more logical because the inferences he drew were those that his masters, with the English love of compromise, had sought to avoid.

Rousseau is the disciple of Locke; and the real difference between them is no more than a removal of the limitations upon the power of government which Locke had proposed.