It is easy for him to say, for instance, that the political institutions of one country will not suit another country; but how infinitely difficult is it to answer the monosyllables How? and Why? To reply to the Why he must make out all the contrasts in the histories of the two countries. But it depends entirely upon what sort of eye he has whether those contrasts will contain for him vital causes of the effect he is seeking to expound. He may let some anecdote escape him which gleams with the very spark needed to kindle his exposition. In looking only for grave political facts he may overlook some apparently trivial outlying detail which contains the very secret he would guess. He may neglect to notice what men are most talked about by the people; whose photographs are most frequently to be seen on the walls of peasant cottages; what books are oftenest on their shelves. Intent upon intrigue and legislation, he may pass over with only a laugh some piquant gossip about legislator or courtier without the least suspicion that it epitomizes a whole scheme of government. He may admire self-government so much as to forget that it is a very coarse, homely thing when alive, and so may really never know anything valuable about it. The man who thinks the polls disagreeable and uninteresting places has no business taking up a pen to write about government. The man who despises the sheriff because he is coarse and uncouth, and who studies the sheriff’s functions only from the drawing-room or the library, will realize the life of government no better than he realizes the vanity of ‘good form.’ If politics were to be studied as a great department of human conduct, not to be understood by a scholar who is not also a man of the world, its literature might be made as imperishable as that of the imagination. There might then enter into it that individuality which is immortality. That personal equation which constitutes the power of all books which have aught of force in them would then rescue books on politics from the dismal category of ‘treatises,’ and exalt them to the patriciate of literature. The needed reaction against the still ‘orthodox’ methods of discoursing upon laws and constitutions, like that already set afoot against the ‘orthodox’ political economists, should be a ‘literary movement’--a movement from formalism to life. In order really to know anything about government, you must _see it alive_; and the object of the writer on politics should be nothing less than this, to paint government to the life, to make it live again upon his page. III POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY