was the loose and negative sentiment of antipathy to the Court, the ministry, and the too servile majority of the House of Commons. The Constitutional Society was furious. Lord Chatham wrote to Lord Rockingham that the work in which these doctrines first appeared must do much mischief to the common cause. And the extreme advanced party was probably right, as extreme advanced parties are usually found to have been, by the time they have persuaded their more timorous neighbours to join them. policy was revolutionary, it is true, but in estimating the precise amount of evil which it may be proper to associate with the idea of revolution, we ought fairly to remember what overtook the nation in its stead.

Their

Between the publication of Burke's Thoughts on the Discontents and the retirement of the King, there was an interval of about forty years. Deduct from this the ten years of Pitt's peace administration, and the rest is the history of prolonged, arbitrary, and violent repression, first in the colonies and afterwards at home. After 1794 the system of government was simply one of absolute despotism. A careful study of the repressive and tyrannical proceedings of this long epoch must convince anybody with an open mind that no subversion of the constitution at the hands of red

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democrats could possibly have been more complete than that which, by the end of the eighteenth century, had been effected by the oligarchs. The Constitutional Society in the end was fully justified by the disasters of despotism in being willing to face the dangers of democracy. Burke, however, thought otherwise, as he thought twenty years afterwards.

"Our constitution," in his opinion, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other." This image was ever before his mind. It occurs again in the last sentence of that great protest against all change and movement, when he describes himself as one who, "when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise."2 Yet, could the most bitter despiser of the constitution have devised a more damaging metaphor? The constitution is no vast and imposing structure, with foundations laid deep, strong, and wide in the energy, enlightenment, integrity, and

1 Present Discontents, Works, i. 148, a,

2 Reflections, Ibid. i. 475, b.

reparative vigour of those for whom the structure was raised and for whom it exists. It is a thing standing on a nice equipoise; any trifling displacement of a stone or a beam may serve to topple it over the steep precipices and down into the deep waters which encircle it on all sides. If this were so, what could its best friend more strenuously desire than that it should be removed with all convenient speed from so perilous an elevation, and placed in unshaken security upon the plain? Burke's theory, which is the Whig and oligarchic theory at its best, implies a forgetfulness of the great truth that there is a kind of natural health in the body polític as in the body physical, by which only a sound existence and a robust vitality can be hoped to be made to continue. His theory attributes too much importance to outward gear and wrappages. These are, indeed, useful or indispensable. But the nice apprehensions of Burke, the timorous cautions of the men who insist on a multiplicity of checks and balances, involve the evil paradox that health depends less upon inborn vigour and force than upon, not merely the quality of the material, but the precise cut and fashion of the political vestment. An inch more here or an inch less there, an extra fold or a fold the fewer, an additional trimming in one place or a seam

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or a band in another place-these are the salvation or the ruin of the wearer.

In spite of his disbelief in specifics for political distempers, Burke had bewailed the loss of the practice of impeachment, as the sacrifice of "that great guardian of the purity of the constitution." The decay of this idea might have roused him to see that less depends upon institutions than upon the spirit which gives to them their vitality. The very circumstances which made the necessity of impeachment so extreme and urgent were precisely those which inevitably prevented the employment of that remedy, and in fact took it out of the list of remedies, even to the idea of it. What are we to think of a safeguard which ceases to operate just when the need for it has grown strongest? While the constitution is pure, while the House of Commons is vigilant and patriotic enough to impeach a bad minister, and the House of Lords firm enough to convict him, the safeguard is worthy of its name. But the conditions which clogged up the legislative and executive parts of the constitution, inevitably and at the very same time clogged up its corrective parts also. And this must always be the case. A constitution is only a 1 Present Discontents, Works, i. 141.

machine. A thorough derangement of the fundamental structure throws no less thoroughly out of gear all the ingenious contrivances which suffice excellently well for minor irregularities. What is gained by pointing to clever safety-valves, and infallible guiding rods, and unerring steam-gauges, when there is no steam being forced in, and the whole machine is choked and corroded with rust? "We Englishmen," Burke once said, complacently, "stop very short of the principles upon which we support any given part of our constitution, or even the whole of it together." 1 True, and we are wise in so doing, provided only the working result of this accommodation of first principles to practical conditions is, in all its aspects, decently satisfactory. It is clearly in the nature of this, as of all similar accommodations, to need revision. The practical conditions change. The working result Surely at this point,

is decently satisfactory no more. to boast of stopping very short of the principles of the constitution is fatuous and disgraceful. If the principles have that elasticity and flexibility which should belong to them, it is to them that we shall best recur in search of fresh and more powerful springs of political action. There may be no harm in partially

Speech on Conciliation with America, Works, i. 200, b.