If any proof of his democracy were required, one might point to his rather surprising statement, which he has repeated more than once, that the chief value of Congressional debate is to arouse and inform public opinion. He regards the will of the people as the real source of governmental policy. Yet he is very impatient of those theories of the rights of man which found favor in France in the eighteenth century and have been the mainspring of democratic movements on the Continent of Europe. He regards political liberty, as we know it in this country, as a peculiar possession of the English race to which, in all that concerns jurisprudence, we Americans belong. The other safeguard against arbitrary action by the combined legislative-administrative power is, he declares, national respect for the spirit of those general legal conceptions which, through many centuries, have been making themselves part and parcel of our racial instinct. He perceives that the British Constitution, though unwritten, is as effective as ours and commands obedience fully as much as ours, and that both appeal to a certain ingrained legal sense, common to all the English-speaking peoples. These peoples do not really have revolutions. What we call the American Revolution was only the reaffirming of principles which were as precious in the eyes of most Englishmen as they were in the eyes of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar circumstances, neglected or contravened. Political development in this family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by evolution. On all these points his _Constitutional Government in the United States_ is only a richer and more mature statement and illustration of the ideas expressed in his _Congressional Government_. The main thesis of his _George Washington_ is that the great Virginian and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action. Again and again he pays respect to Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress. Mr. Wilson has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke. And if Burke has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster. The choice of book and teacher is significant. _Mere Literature_ shows how Mr. Wilson revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their lessons well. In _An Old Master and Other Essays_, he had already borne witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic processes.