If you know what you are looking for and are not expecting to find it advertised in the newspapers, but lying somewhere beneath the surface of things, the dullest fool may often help you to its discovery. It needs a good nose to do the thing, but look how excellent is the game to which a casual scent may bring you in such a domain as the study of politics. There are whole worlds of fact waiting to be discovered by inference. Do not expect to find the life of constitutions painted in the great ‘standard authorities,’ but, following with becoming patience their legal anatomy of institutions, watch their slightest movement toward an illustrative foot-note, and try to find under that the scent you are in quest of. If they cite an instance, seek the recital of the same case elsewhere, where it is told with a different purpose; if it promise well there, hunt it further still, and make sure you catch every glimpse it affords of men’s actual dealings with government. If your text mention names of consequence, seek them out in biographies, and scan there the personal relations of men with affairs, for hints of the methods by which governments are operated from day to day. You will not need any incentive to read all their gossip, in letters and journals, and so see governors as men; but do more: endure official interviews and sessions of Parliament with them; collate their private letters and their public despatches--there’s no telling when or where you shall strike fresh trails of the game you seek. Interview judges off the bench, courtiers away from court, officers off duty. Go to France and live next door a prefect in the provinces; go to London and try to find out how things of weight are talked about in the smoking-room of the House of Commons.