Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Different Principles on Which the Chief Systems of Popular Representation Have Been Based in Ancient and Modern Times: A Prize Essay, Read in the Theatre, Oxford, June 20th, 1855
The moral greatness of political societies is not to be measured solely by the form of their institutions. Forms of polity are ana logons to bodily organization; they owe all their force and ex pression to the soul which animates them, to the living, spirit of Considered apart from the soul, the body-politic is rpse, and the study of it mere anatomy, -a matter of curious and necessary research, but subordinate to the sublimer aims of political philosophy. These aims, indeed, can never be fully realized; for the inner life of individual states, as of indi vidual human beings, is an inscrutable mystery. Still, even in the external aspect of nations, there are many features besides their forms of government; and in estimating the actual state of any particular community, its ethnological origin, its lan guage, its civilization, the spirit of its laws, above all, the cha racter of its religion, all the elements, in short, .which constitute its identity, are to be viewed as so many agents 00-0perating with, and in a great degree modifying, the in?uence of its con stitution. Institutions, it has been said, do not decide all in the life of nations3 that is, they are neither the sole cause nor the sole index of national well-being, which depends on many other conditions, and, like beauty, results less from the absolute excellence of its component parts, than from their harmonious combination.
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