Montesquieu

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: had been to Tacitus. It was a neighbouring country in which he found, or thought that he found, principles of liberty which had vanished from his own country, and for the restoration of which he hoped. And he sketched those principles like a great artist, with a bold and free sweep of the brush. He sought...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: had been to Tacitus. It was a neighbouring country in which he found, or thought that he found, principles of liberty which had vanished from his own country, and for the restoration of which he hoped. And he sketched those principles like a great artist, with a bold and free sweep of the brush. He sought to render the spirit and characteristic features: for minute accuracies of topographical detail he eared as little as Turner cared in painting a landscape. That a book thus conceived should be read with delight and admiration by Englishmen was not surprising . Its practical influence was first exercised inEnglish lands, not indeed in Old England, but in the New England which was growing up beyond the seas. When Washington talked about the Lycian republic we may be sure he was quoting directly, or indirectly, from the Spirit of Laws. From the same book Hamilton and Madison in the Federalist drew arguments for federation and for the division between legislative, executive, and judicial powers1. And later on, Thomas Jefferson, a statesman bred in a widely different school of thought, had a curious commentary on the Spirit of Laws prepared for him by a peer of France, who was a member of the French Institute and of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia2. 1 Nugent's English translation of the Spirit of Laws appears to have been published in 1750. See Montesquieu's letter to the translator of Oct. 18, 1750. A second edition, of which there is a copy in the British Museum, appeared in 1752, and several other editions followed. 'My delight, ' says Gibbon in his autobiography, 'was in the frequent perusal of Montesquieu, whose energy of style and boldness of hypothesis were powerful to awaken and stimulate the genius of the age.' There is a curious and characteristic rhaps...