But failure and bewilderment may present as stern a demand for thought as the most successful revolution, and, in many respects, that demand is now being well answered. Political experience is recorded and examined with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. The history of political action in the past, instead of being left to isolated scholars, has become the subject of organised and minutely subdivided labour. The new political developments of the present, Australian Federation, the Referendum in Switzerland, German Public Finance, the Party system in England and America, and innumerable others, are constantly recorded, discussed and compared in the monographs and technical magazines which circulate through all the universities of the globe. The only form of study which a political thinker of one or two hundred years ago would now note as missing is any attempt to deal with politics in its relation to the nature of man. The thinkers of the past, from Plato to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made those views the basis of their speculations on government. But no modern treatise on political science, whether dealing with institutions or finance, now begins with anything corresponding to the opening words of Bentham's _Principles of Morals and Legislation_--'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure'; or to the 'first general proposition' of Nassau Senior's _Political Economy,_ 'Every man desires to obtain additional wealth with as little sacrifice as possible.'[1] In most cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is conscious of possessing any conception of human nature at all. [1] _Political, Economy_ (in the _Encyclopedia Metropolitana_), 2nd edition (1850), p. 26.