"It is upon the passions of mankind," he says, "that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the action of the various parts of a state depends.

The machine may vary as to its dimensions; but its movement and acting springs still remain intrinsically the same." Elsewhere he speaks of government as "a great ballet or dance in which ...

everything depends upon the disposition of the figures." He does not deal, that is to say, with men as men, but only as inert adjuncts of a machine by which they are controlled.

Such an attitude is bound to suffer from the patent vices of all abstraction.
It regards historic forces as distinct from the men related to them.
Every mob, he says, must have its Spartacus; every republic will tend to unstability.

The English avoid these dangers by playing off the royal power against the popular.