when George III. had been ten years upon the throne, is the virtual refutation of the Patriot King. Events had already shown the idea to be pregnant with unspoken mischief, unless you can always be quite sure that your patriot king will be great enough and strong enough for his post. Burke understood the true significance of these events. Their lesson impressed him profoundly. He saw that the government of all by one had broken down very evidently, and very disastrously. He concluded that the only remedy was to return to "the ancient lines of the constitution," to the system of the government of all by a virtuous and public-spirited few, who would be the reflection of the wishes and interests of all. He did not rise to the still higher conception of a government of all by all, of a whole people by themselves. Prussian autocracy, or its boorish imitation at St. James's, filled him with apprehension and hatred. But I am unable to find any evidence throughout his writings that he had a glimpse of the true opposite of the system of Bolingbroke, of which our modern type, the great Western Republic, has risen to grandeur since Burke's death. Burke's theory was fundamentally and in ultimate principle not very different from Bolingbroke's. There are two ways of viewing government.

According to one, all government should be for the people; according to the other, it should be not only for the people, but by the people. Burke was as far as Bolingbroke from admitting the latter of these two conflicting theories. He saw that the government by a bad and narrow-minded sovereign, assisted by a contemptible clique, was not government for the people in any sense. An aristocracy with popular sympathies seemed to him then, as it always did, the true remedy for the revolutionary feeling which was at that time so dangerously visible, as well as the best embodiment of true and permanent principles of government. The House of Commons was then a highly aristocratic body. Burke admired it on this very account. The House of Commons was designed as "a control for the people." Never at any time did he abandon this tutelary view of the relations between the people and the House; that the legislators chosen by a few electors were to be humane, wise, far-seeing, animated solely by consideration for the welfare of all those for whom they legislated. Yet what is this but the theory of the good despot in another shape and with a new face?

Before examining this more fully, let us return to the historic side, and notice once more that to Burke the revival of the Whig party was due. His eloquence

and ardour acted on them like the touch of the spear of Ithuriel. They flung off the degraded shape which had grown about them, and sprang up with new fire and new vitality. The chief of modern Whigs has extolled the service rendered to the country by Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents, "by instilling into the minds of young politicians, who at that time were greatly increasing in number throughout the country, those wise and beneficial principles which their Whig ancestors had practised, but which the old intriguers of that day had entirely forgotten." To realize the difference between an old Whig and a new Whiga Whig of 1760, and a Whig of 1780-we may study the conduct of a great chief of Earl Russell's own house, two years before the publication of that book which was the signal for the revival of the party. "In 1768," says a historian, himself a Whig, "instead of taking a course worthy of his name and ability, the head of the house of Russell was intent only on securing the preponderance of his own weight in the government. What that government should be was a secondary object. His first desire was that it should. be constituted principally of his nominees. The Court might take what line of policy they pleased; the Whigs might be a scattered and disbanded corps; the

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Duke of Bedford would not take the responsibility of office upon himself; but must have his Gowers, his Weymouths, and his Rigbys in administration." This is what Whig principles had come to, and must always come to in the long run, as well as all other principles which erect either a privileged governing class or a single privileged ruler. The corruption of Bolingbroke's theory in so pitiful an imitation of a Patriot King as the Third George, was not worse or more injurious to the common weal than the corruption of the Aristocratic theory in so pitiful an imitation of an "aristocratic body with popular sympathies" as the Duke of Bedford and his crew. If we would learn the impulse which Burke gave to this corrupt and fallen faction, we have only to compare the Duke of Bedford, as Mr. Massey has described him, with such men as Charles James Fox, and Windham, and Grey, and, greatest of them all, with Burke himself.

There may, perhaps, be said to have been four leading movements of political thought in England in the eighteenth century. The first was initiated by the Whigs of the Revolution, and proceeded on the assumption that a benevolent Providence created the

1 Massey's History of England during the Reign of George III i. 366 (ed. 1865).

people of England in order that they might be governed by a select number of patrician families. With the second, we may associate the names of Bolingbroke, who expounded it with unrivalled brilliance and force, and of Bute, North, and George III., whose signal incapacity brought it in the course of twenty years to an ignoble and contumelious end. The third movement was initiated by Burke, and carried on by disciples who went further than their master. The fourth movement rose at the end of the American War of Independence, received a powerful impetus from the ever memorable outbreak against feudalism and privilege in France, was checked again by the horror which some of the excesses of that outbreak aroused, was forcibly repressed during that most dismal period in English history from 1794 to 1815, burst forth again uncontrollably after the peace, wrung the Reform Bill from the patrician oligarchy, wrung new poor laws and free trade from selfish or ignorant squires, and will, before long, still further impair that fabric of artificial privileges which must deservedly fall when they have become dissociated from the notion of superior political obligations.

It is very unjust to Burke to overlook the great services which he rendered by promoting one of these

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