The English reader of the Letters is naturally struck by the absence of any adequate account of our political liberties and free constitutional forms. There is a good chapter on Bacon, one on inoculation, and several on the Quakers, but on the civil constitution hardly a word of large appreciativeness. Not only this, but there is no sign that Voltaire either set any due or special value on the popular forms of the Hanoverian time, or clearly understood that the liberty, which was so amazing and so precious to him in the region of speculative and literary activity, was the direct fruit of that general spirit of freedom, which is naturally engendered in a people accustomed to take an active part in the conduct of its own affairs. Liberty in spirituals was adorable to him, but for liberty in temporals he never seems to have had more than a very distant and verbal kind of respect; just because, with all his unmatched keenness of sight, he failed to discover that the English sturdiness in the matter of civil rights was the very root and cause, not only of that material prosperity which struck him so much, and of the slightness and movableness of the line which divided the aristocracy from the commercial classes, but also of the fact that a Newton and a Locke were inwardly emboldened to give free play to their intelligence without fear of being punished for their conclusions, and of the only less important fact that whatever conclusions speculative genius might establish would be given to the world without interposition from any court or university or official tribunal. Voltaire undoubtedly admired the English for their parliament, because the material and superficial advantages that delighted him were evidently due to the system, which happened to be parliamentary. What we miss is any consciousness that these advantages would not have been what they were, if they had been conferred by an absolute sovereign; any recognition that political activity throughout a nation works in a thousand indirect but most potent ways, and is not more to be prized for this, than for its direct and most palpable consequences. In one place, indeed, he mentions that the honour paid to men of letters is due to the form of government, but his language betrays a wholly inadequate and incorrect notion of the true operation of the form of government. ‘There are in London,’ he says, ‘about eight hundred people with the right of speaking in public, and maintaining the interests of the nation. Some five or six thousand pretend to the same honour in their turn. All the rest set themselves up to judge these, and everybody can print what he thinks. So all the nation is bound to instruct itself. All talk is about the governments of Athens and Rome, and it becomes necessary to read the authors who have discussed them. That naturally leads to love of polite learning.’[51] This is to confound a very trivial accident of popular governments with their essence.