Adam Smith fitted in with the great mechanical inventions that were made at the same time is too obvious to need dwelling upon. To perceive clearly, first, that manufactures enrich, not impoverish a country, and second, that manufactures thrive better where there are the fewest restrictions on the free interchange of commodities-first, to assert the power of manufactures in increasing the national wealth, and second, to establish the conditions under which this power can rise to the greatest height of efficiency-this was the natural accompaniment in theory to the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton and Watt in practice. Still less need I devote any words to establish the underlying connexion which subsists between a vigorous industrial movement and the impulse towards the abolition of privilege. Any ordinary House of Commons politician knows that the artisans are, as a class, the resolute enemies of Privilege, though perhaps barely resolute enough. The vigorous growth of manufactures is indirectly as fatal to favoured orders, as the foundation of the American Republic and the French Revolution were directly.

These, then, were the two prime characteristics which sum up the tendencies of Burke's age: an enormous development of industry, and the first germs of a sub

stitution of the government of a whole people by itself for the exploded and tottering system of government by privileged orders. The seeds thus sown have come up with unequal rapidity, yet their maturity will not improbably be contemporaneous. The organisation of

Labour and the overthrow of Privilege are tasks which?

we may expect to see perfected at the same time, because most of the conditions that lie about the root of the one are also at the foundation of the other. When we can grapple with the moral confusion that reigns in one field, the obstacles in the other will no longer discourage or baffle us.

A statesman may well be pardoned for not discerning the germs of new things about his feet: he too often fails to see them even when they have grown breast high. It is but little reproach to him not to have descried the small cloud on the remote horizon no bigger than a man's hand, when he so often moves in serene unconsciousness of the tempest ready to burst over his head. But the truly wise man, to whom posterity may avow a debt of gratitude, even if he be not keen-sighted enough to see the direction in which the distant lines of the future are stretching, will always be enough in harmony with the best influences of his time to spend his activity in unconscious pre

paration for the new state. This was the case with Burke. He did not see whither the moral and political agencies of his day were ultimately tending. He did not understand that there were conditions in active operation which would, in the long run, entirely dissolve into air his conception of the best government as an aristocracy of birth with popular sympathies. But he was sufficiently alive to the force of these conditions, and sufficiently sensible of the virtue that was in them, to expend his energies in a way that did much to prepare an easier opening for the consummation of an end which, in the form that it then threatened to assume, he openly abhorred. Sansculottism in Burke's day, as in our own, was habitually identified with democracy. A democrat in society and elsewhere was always taken for a Jacobin. This spurious imitation of a free national government naturally excited the utmost repugnance in the mind of such a partisan of order as Burke was. But, however unconsciously, he did his best to prepare the way for the advent of the true Democracy, by insisting, at a time when the popular sympathies of the privileged classes were lukewarm or extinct, that government existed for the people, and that the will of the people is the irresistible master of those to whom it has entrusted the guardian

ship of its rights. He had one supreme idea. This was the adaptation of the established order of government to the wants and the interests of the governed. There were thus two objects of his reverence, the established order of things, and the wishes and welfare of those for whom the established order existed. Until the French Revolution, the circumstances of his country made the popular interest most prominent in his mind. Then the Revolution came, and all his solicitude was for the established order of things. The time has perhaps not yet come for us to characterise this tremendous convulsion. It would be useless to attempt to strike a balance between the service which Burke rendered to the cause of Progress by his consistent advocacy of popular principles until 1790, and the ill which he did afterwards by helping to organise the terrors of the panic-stricken rulers of the country into an instrument for a long reign of political repression and absolutism. Let us, first, at all events, confine our attention to the part that Burke played in the constitutional struggles which began with the accession of George III. and which raged, at last in the shape of Regency Debates, up to the very year of the great outbreak that extinguished them for nearly forty years

to come.

Until the accession of Pitt in 1783, there were three leading issues. The first concerned the relations between the sovereign and the chambers; the second, between the chambers and the people; and the third, between the sovereign and the chambers, and the executive. The question in the first case was, whether the will of the sovereign or the vote of the chamber should be the final and decisive appeal in great affairs of State; whether the sovereign, under the thin and temporary disguise of Influence, should be the true dictator and autocrat over the legislature, while the latter dwindled into the submissive registrar of his decrees; or whether the House of Commons should become the supreme organ, the chief centre of force and energy, the seat of the most vital functions, in the governing system. The second issue was, whether the House of Commons should assume that arbitrary and indisputable authority over the people which the King aspired to assume over the House, or whether the desires and opinions of the whole people should be the ultimate guide and standard of legislative action. The third issue was, whether the ministry of the day should be a solidly compacted body, acting on some one common principle of policy, all standing together, all falling together, and corporately responsible to the House of