They had innovated on a generally received principle, and they cannot claim the distinction of being either the first or the last who have imagined that to take the incipient steps in political improvement is at once to reach the goal of perfection.

The age in which we live is characterised in no ordinary degree, by a certain boldness and rapidity in the march of intellectual and political improvements.

Flattering as is the condition of our country at the present period, because of its unexampled advance in all the steps of social and political improvement, it can not be disguised that there is a lurking danger already apparent in the neglect of this warning truth, and that the time has arrived when the representatives of the people should be employed in devising some more appropriate remedy than now exists to avert it.

Every step in political improvement renders it more so, by removing the sources of opposition of interest, and levelling those inequalities of legal privilege between individuals or classes, owing to which there are large portions of mankind whose happiness it is still practicable to disregard.

POLITICAL IMPROVEMENT, schemes of, ii. 102.

'It sometimes happens that men entangle themselves in their own schemes,' iii. 386; 'Most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things,' ii.

The Benthamites, led first by James Mill, and afterwards in a secondary degree by John Mill, had pushed a number of political improvements in the radical and democratic direction during the time when the Edinburgh so powerfully represented more orthodox liberalism.

Though himself extremely cool and sceptical about political improvement of every sort, he took abundant interest in more ardent friends.