The two tendencies, experimental and conservative, have both been manifested many times in French constitutions. How many there have been of them I cannot inform the reader. Dicey gives a minimum of sixteen; there may have been more. The number of them is of no importance; the state of mind that produced them is alone of any real importance. [Sidenote: The Love of Change not the Motive for making written Constitutions.] [Sidenote: The Desire for Order and Permanence.] [Sidenote: Premature Hopes of Order.] [Sidenote: Revision.] It has commonly been assumed that a state of mind which could produce so many constitutions was animated by the love of change. This is exactly the opposite of the truth. Those who love change on its own account provide for it by the most elastic arrangements in order to leave everything open. The state of feeling that induces men to bind themselves, or try to bind themselves, by written rules for their future guidance is a desire for order and permanence. All that can be truly said against the French experimenters is that their hopes of orderly arrangements were premature. Even when producing disorder they have been lovers of order and desired it, though during many years, in the eagerness of inexperience, they failed to perceive that their political life was still too much unsettled to be cast into fixed forms. At last, without abandoning the safeguard of a written constitution (that of 1875 has already a respectable antiquity), they have provided for future changes by making revision possible under conditions that have hitherto completely assured the maintenance of order. [Sidenote: Sir Henry Maine on the Dislike to Change.] [Sidenote: The Mohammedan World.] [Sidenote: Africa.] [Sidenote: China.] The reader perhaps remembers how eloquently Sir Henry Maine described the dislike to change which is inherent in large bodies of mankind. “Vast populations, some of them with a civilisation considerable but peculiar, detest that which in the west would be called reform. The entire Mohammedan world detests it. The multitude of coloured men who swarm in the great continent of Africa detest it, and it is detested by that large part of mankind which we are accustomed to leave on one side as barbarous or savage. The millions upon millions of men who fill the Chinese empire loathe it and (what is more) despise it.... There is not the shadow of a doubt that the enormous mass of the Indian population hates and dreads change, as is natural in the parts of a body-social solidified by caste.”[29] [Sidenote: Modern Character of the Enthusiasm for Change.] Sir Henry Maine afterwards pointed out that the enthusiasm for change was not only comparatively rare but also extremely modern. “It is known but to a small part of mankind, and to that part but for a short period during a history of incalculable length. It is not older than the free employment of legislation by popular governments.”