Considerations of a Representative Government | Page 2

strictly a practical art,
giving rise to no questions but those of means and an end. Forms of
government are assimilated to any other expedients for the attainment
of human objects. They are regarded as wholly an affair of invention
and contrivance. Being made by man, it is assumed that man has the
choice either to make them or not, and how or on what pattern they
shall be made. Government, according to this conception, is a problem,

to be worked like any other question of business. The first step is to
define the purposes which governments are required to promote. The
next, is to inquire what form of government is best fitted to fulfill those
purposes. Having satisfied ourselves on these two points, and
ascertained the form of government which combines the greatest
amount of good with the least of evil, what further remains is to obtain
the concurrence of our countrymen, or those for whom the institutions
are intended, in the opinion which we have privately arrived at. To find
the best form of government; to persuade others that it is the best; and,
having done so, to stir them up to insist on having it, is the order of
ideas in the minds of those who adopt this view of political philosophy.
They look upon a constitution in the same light (difference of scale
being allowed for) as they would upon a steam plow, or a threshing
machine.
To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so
far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they
regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of
government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According to
them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must take
them, in the main, as we find them. Governments can not be
constructed by premeditated design. They "are not made, but grow."
Our business with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to
acquaint ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt ourselves to
them. The fundamental political institutions of a people are considered
by this school as a sort of organic growth from the nature and life of
that people; a product of their habits, instincts, and unconscious wants
and desires, scarcely at all of their deliberate purposes. Their will has
had no part in the matter but that of meeting the necessities of the
moment by the contrivances of the moment, which contrivances, if in
sufficient conformity to the national feelings and character, commonly
last, and, by successive aggregation, constitute a polity suited to the
people who possess it, but which it would be vain to attempt to
superinduce upon any people whose nature and circumstances had not
spontaneously evolved it.
It is difficult to decide which of these doctrines would be the most

absurd, if we could suppose either of them held as an exclusive theory.
But the principles which men profess, on any controverted subject, are
usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they really hold. No
one believes that every people is capable of working every sort of
institution. Carry the analogy of mechanical contrivances as far as we
will, a man does not choose even an instrument of timber and iron on
the sole ground that it is in itself the best. He considers whether he
possesses the other requisites which must be combined with it to render
its employment advantageous, and, in particular whether those by
whom it will have to be worked possess the knowledge and skill
necessary for its management. On the other hand, neither are those who
speak of institutions as if they were a kind of living organisms really
the political fatalists they give themselves out to be. They do not
pretend that mankind have absolutely no range of choice as to the
government they will live under, or that a consideration of the
consequences which flow from different forms of polity is no element
at all in deciding which of them should be preferred. But, though each
side greatly exaggerates its own theory, out of opposition to the other,
and no one holds without modification to either, the two doctrines
correspond to a deep-seated difference between two modes of thought;
and though it is evident that neither of these is entirely in the right, yet
it being equally evident that neither is wholly in the wrong, we must
endeavour to get down to what is at the root of each, and avail
ourselves of the amount of truth which exists in either.
Let us remember, then, in the first place, that political institutions
(however the proposition may be at times ignored) are the work of
men--owe their origin and their whole existence to human will.