One cannot help marvelling that facts so obvious as these should have escaped the perception of some of the sagest thinkers and most thorough historical scholars of our day. Yet so it is. Sir Henry Maine, even, the great interpreter to Englishmen of the historical forces operative in law and social institutions, has utterly failed, in his plausible work on _Popular Government_, to distinguish the democracy, or rather the popular government, of the English race, which is bred by slow circumstance and founded upon habit, from the democracy of other peoples, which is bred by discontent and founded upon revolution. He has missed that most obvious teaching of events, that successful democracy differs from unsuccessful in being a product of history,--a product of forces not suddenly become operative, but slowly working upon whole peoples for generations together. The level of democracy is the level of every-day habit, the level of common national experiences, and lies far below the elevations of ecstasy to which the revolutionist climbs. III. While there can be no doubt about the derivation of our government from habit rather than from doctrine, from English experience rather than from European thought; while it is evident that our institutions were originally but products of a long, unbroken, unperverted constitutional history; and certain that we shall preserve our institutions in their integrity and efficiency only so long as we keep true in our practice to the traditions from which our first strength was derived, there is, nevertheless, little doubt that the forces peculiar to the new civilization of our day, and not only these, but also the restless forces of European democratic thought and anarchic turbulence brought to us in such alarming volume by immigration, have deeply affected and may deeply modify the forms and habits of our politics. All vital governments--and by vital governments I mean those which have life in their outlying members as well as life in their heads--all systems in which self-government lives and retains its self-possession, must be governments by neighbors, by peoples not only homogeneous, but characterized within by the existence among their members of a quick sympathy and an easy neighborly knowledge of each other. Not foreseeing steam and electricity or the diffusion of news and knowledge which we have witnessed, our fathers were right in thinking it impossible for the government which they had founded to spread without strain or break over the whole of the continent. Were not California now as near neighbor to the Atlantic States as Massachusetts then was to New York, national self-government on our present scale would assuredly hardly be possible, or conceivable even. Modern science, scarcely less than our pliancy and steadiness in political habit, may be said to have created the United States of to-day.