This implies a dominant characteristic of the English political movement. It was led, to use a later phrase, by Whigs not Radicals; by men who fully accepted the British constitution, and proposed to remove abuses, not to recast the whole system. The Whig wished to carry out more thoroughly the platform accepted in 1688, to replace decaying by sound timbers; but not to reconstruct from the base or to override tradition by abstract and obsolete theories. His desire for change was limited by a strong though implicit conservatism. This characteristic is reflected in the sphere of speculative activity. Philosophy was represented by the Scottish school whose watchword was common sense. Reid opposed the scepticism of Hume which would lead, as he held, to knocking his head against a post--a course clearly condemned by common sense; but instead of soaring into transcendental and ontological regions, he stuck to 'Baconian induction' and a psychology founded upon experience. Hume himself, as I have said, had written for the speculative few not for the vulgar; and he had now turned from the chase of metaphysical refinements to historical inquiry. Interest in history had become characteristic of the time. The growth of a stable, complex, and continuous social order implies the formation of a corporate memory. Masses of records had already been accumulated by antiquaries who had constructed rather annals than history, in which the series of events was given without much effort to arrange them in literary form or trace the causal connection. In France, however, Montesquieu had definitely established the importance of applying the historical method to political problems; and Voltaire had published some of his brilliant surveys which attempt to deal with the social characteristics as well as the mere records of battles and conquests. Hume's _History_, admirably written, gave Englishmen the first opportunity of enjoying a lucid survey of the conspicuous facts previously embedded in ponderous antiquarian phrases. Hume was one of the triumvirate who produced the recognised masterpieces of contemporary literature. Robertson's theories are, I take it, superseded: but his books, especially the _Charles V._, not only gave broad surveys but suggested generalisations as to the development of institutions, which, like most generalisations, were mainly wrong, but stimulated further inquiry. Gibbon, the third of the triumvirate, uniting the power of presenting great panoramas of history with thorough scholarship and laborious research, produced the great work which has not been, if it ever can be, superseded. A growing interest in history thus led to some of the chief writings of the time, as we can see that it was the natural outgrowth of the intellectual position. The rapid widening of the historical horizon made even a bare survey useful, and led to some recognition of the importance of guiding and correcting political and social theory by careful investigation of