The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor.

It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want.

With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some special experience universalized.

That does not mean that the past is worthless.

Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand.