sont des hommes," wrote La Bruyère, in his bitter
sketch of the French peasantry of the old régime.
They were men, but they were not voters. Our
modern wealth, kindlier, more self-restrained, less
arrogant than in the past, yet lives under the
curious gaze of a giant, always armed, and some-
times hungry. Democracy in England has not
used its powers: it has, indeed, scarcely been
conscious of them. But that is due to circum-
stances and conditions, which are not sempiternal,
and may not much longer endure.

Whatever difficulties may lie before us, we can
be allowed to hope that they will be met by those
processes of adaptation and adjustment with which
the survey of our annals has made us familiar:
if there are great changes to come that they will
be accomplished under the ancient usages, and
through the established methods of traditional
legality. In the foregoing pages it has not been
deemed necessary to treat the Constitution with
the undiscriminating adulation sometimes bestowed
upon it: as though it were the perfection of human
wisdom and prescient design, whereas in many
of its parts it is no more than the result of
fortunate chance and temporary expedient. But
it enshrines within its being the principle of Life
and the principle of Law. Its capacity for growth,
its rhythmical flexibility of movement have not left
it; and we may trust that its venerable forms, and
salutary conventions, will prove equal to the
rending strain of social reorganisation in the future,
even as they have withstood the shocks and
tempests of political reconstruction in the past.

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