the stream of the wind; and his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant, which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever soil it may grow. We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others; and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge. It is in the differences that it actually consists. [This remarkable fragment was published by Medwin in The Shelley Papers, having previously appeared in The Athenæum for the 20th of April, 1833, with the remark, "We have considered it best to print this fragment as left by the poet, and to leave it to the reader's imagination to supply its imperfections.' Like some others of The Shelley Papers, it was silently abandoned by Mrs. Shelley. We may perhaps infer, without any great stretch of imagination, that it is a portion of the substantive Treatise on Political Reform mentioned in the Preface to the Essays &c. (1840), page xviii, as "to be published when his works assume a complete shape."-H. B. F.] A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT BY JURIES. A FRAGMENT. GOVERNMENT, as it now subsists, is perhaps an engine at once the most expensive and inartificial that could have been devised as a remedy for the imperfections of society. Immense masses of the product of labour are committed to the discretion of certain individuals for the purpose of executing its intentions, or interpreting its meaning. These have not been consumed, but wasted, in the principal part of the past history of political society. Government may be distributed into two parts:First, the fundamental-that is, the permanent forms, which regulate the deliberation or the action of the whole; from which it results that a state is democratical, or aristocratical, or despotic, or a combination of all these principles. And Secondly-the necessary or accidental-that is, those that determine, not the forms according to which the deliberation or the action of the mass of the community is to be regulated, but the opinions or moral |