and end by being master. There is the problem which he has to solve.
First of all, we must see the facts before our eyes. Bagehot's greatest merit is that he perceives and complies with this necessary condition of useful inquiry. He illustrates a maxim which he is fond of quoting from Paley. It is much harder to make men see that there is a difficulty than to make them understand the explanation when once they see the difficulty. We build up elaborate screens of words and formulæ which effectually hide the facts, and make us content with sham explanations. 'The reason,' he says, 'why so few good books are written is that so few people that can write know anything.' An author 'has always lived in a room'; he has read books and knows the best authors, but he does not learn the use of his own ears and eyes. That is terribly true, as every author must sorrowfully admit; and probably it is nowhere truer than of English political philosophers. English statesmen had made any number of acute remarks behind which, one supposes, there ought to lie some general theory; but when they tried to say what it was, they fell into grievous platitudes and the conventional twaddle which is a weariness to the
