Politics is the life of the State, and nothing which illustrates that life, nothing which reveals any habit contracted by man as a political animal, comes amiss in the study of politics. Public law is the formal basis of the political life of society, but it is not always an expression of its vital principle. We are inclined, oftentimes, to take laws and constitutions too seriously, to put implicit faith in their professions without examining their conduct. Do they affect to advance liberty, for instance? We ought to go, in person or in imagination, amongst the people whom they command, and see for ourselves whether those people enjoy liberty. With reference to laws and constitutions of our own day, we can learn such things best by supplementing books and study by travel and observation. The best-taught class in modern public law would be a travelling class. Other times than our own we must perforce be content to see through other men’s eyes. In other words, statute books and legal commentaries are all very well in the study of politics, if only you quite thoroughly understand that they furnish only the crude body-colors for your picture of the State’s life, upon which all your finer luminous and atmospheric effects are afterwards to be worked. It is high time to recognize the fact that politics can be effectually expounded only by means of the highest literary methods. Only master workers in language and in the grouping and interpretation of heterogeneous materials can achieve the highest success in making real _in words_ the complex life of States. If I might act as the interpreter of the new-school economists of whom I have already spoken, I trust with due reverence, I should say that this is the thought which, despite their too frequent practical contempt for artistic literary form, is possessing them. John Stuart Mill and Ricardo made a sort of logic of political economy; in order to simplify their processes, they deliberately stripped man of all motives save self-interest alone, and the result was evidently ‘_doctrinaire_’--was not a picture of life, but a theorem of trade. Hence “the most dismal of all sciences;” hence Sidney Smith’s exhortation to his friend not to touch the hard, unnatural thing. The new-school economists revolt, and say they want “a more scientific method.” What they really want is a higher literary method. They want to take account of how a man’s wife affects his trade, how his children stiffen his prudence, how his prejudices condition his enterprise, how his lack of imagination limits his market, how strongly love of home holds him back from the good wages that might be had by emigration, how despotically the opinion of his neighbors forbids his insisting upon a cash business, how his position in local society prescribes the commodities he is _not_ to deal in; in brief, how men actually do labor, plan, and get gain. They are, therefore, portentously busy amassing particulars about