he installed Pitt. The sway of the revolution families was finally broken; their exclusive title to place and pay finally abrogated. This much was at least settled, that the monarch, whatever else he might be, should at all events not be a puppet in the hands of Whig chieftains; and that the government of the country, to whomsoever it might fall, should no longer be the appanage of a band of incompetent nobles, whose only claim to it was that their grandfathers had dethroned a king by whom their pride had been wounded, and by whom the Anglican clergy, his rivals in bigotry, had been irritated and alarmed into revolt against their own ecclesiastical principles. "The general election of 1784," Lord Russell says, "determined for more than forty years the question of the government of England." 1 In 1782 Fox prophesied to Pitt under the gallery that the Rockinghams would go out, and the old system be revived. "And they look to you," he added. "If they reckon upon me," Pitt replied, "they may find themselves mistaken." Fox afterwards repeated this, and said, "I believe they do reckon on Pitt, and I believe they will not be mistaken." Sir G. C. Lewis says that "neither of the parties in this dialogue were quite right in their anticipations" (Administrations of Great Britain from 1783 to 1830, p. 76), and argues that the contest between Fox and the King ended in a compromise. He does not mean, I take it, that there was any compromise on that part of the contest which turned on the King's independence of the old connexions in choosing his minister. This feature at least of the old system was distinctly revived and sustained. Meanwhile, events had happened which had made the King's victory of 1783 far less decisive in his own favour than it might have seemed to him and to others at the time. It was a final victory over the Old Whigs, but it inflicted no more than a momentary defeat on the New. This party, which performed so conspicuous a function in English politics, and the lingering remnants of which still figure on the political stage, was the creation of Edmund Burke. Most of them vilipended Some of their political him bitterly in later days. descendants vilipend him now. lent thanklessness shown by patricians in every age and country towards the greater plebeians who supply them with ideas and a policy, the party never offered him a seat in their cabinets. But for all that, he was their inspirer. To him they owed the whole vitality of their creed, the whole coherence of their principles, the whole of that enlightenment, that rational love of liberty, that antipathy to arbitrary ideas, on which rest their just claims to the gratitude of their descendants. Burke, from 1770 to 1790, was in the politics of the eighteenth century what Wesley was in its religion. He entered into the midst of the valley and found it full of dry bones. By his imagination, his reasoning, his enormous knowledge, above all, by his ardour and impetuosity of character, he brought the dead Whig principles up from out of the grave, and kindled a life in them, which has only just flickered out for ever in our own days. He made a vigorous effort to restore popular ideas to that high place in practical politics from which they had been excluded ever since the glorious days of the Great Rebellion. From the Restoration to the Revolution, the spirit of reaction enjoyed a scarcely disturbed triumph. From the Revolution down to the accession of George III. English statesmen were all absorbed either in maintaining or overthrowing that final movement for aristocratic supremacy, of which in truth no more than the mere prologue had been completed with the dethronement of James II. There was no room for ideas until the task of suppressing Jacobitism had been brought to a decisive close; and even when this was done, and the ceaseless intrigues and machinations of fifty years were thoroughly and for ever baffled, time was still needed in which the statesmen of the old school might gradually disappear to make way for others, who to a new set of circumstances should bring a new set of maxims and a new spirit. It was Burke who first seized the true significance of the situation, who first proclaimed the principles of the rising movement, and who thus led the Whigs to the forgotten truth, that a government exists for the sake of the whole people. Bolingbroke, abandoning the old theory of Divine Right, had seen this as clearly as either Burke or any other thinker. The whole argument of the Patriot King turns on the doctrine that the good of the people is the ultimate and true end of government. Locke himself furnished this base to Bolingbroke's famous speculation, "That since men were directed by nature to form societies, because they cannot by their natures subsist without them, nor in a state of individuality, and since they were directed in like manner to establish governments, because societies cannot be maintained without them, nor subsist in a state of anarchy, the ultimate end of all governments is the good of the people, for whose sake they were made, and without whose consent they would not have been made."1 Starting from this, Bolingbroke expounded the spirit in which a patriotic monarch would govern his subjects, insisting that he should make no difference between his own rights and those of his people, except in regarding the first as trusts, and the last as absolute property. If George III. trained as he is said to have been in the doctrines of this work, had possessed capacity and 1 The Idea of a Patriot King, p. 118 (ed. 1749). generosity enough to understand and assimilate them, if he had even distantly resembled his illustrious cousin, the King of Prussia, the history of this country might have moved in a very different direction from that which it has actually taken. But instead of being a hero, George III. was only a dull man with a rather bad heart. He did not understand his own principles, and even if he had had ability enough to understand them, he had no ability to carry them into practice. There is nothing more fatal, either in private life or in the larger affairs of state, than for an incompetent man to grasp a principle of action that is too big for him. Such was the case with this wretched sovereign. He tried to play the good despot over the vast empire of Britain, with a capacity barely above the mark of a parish constable. Within ten years he brought England to the verge of revolution. Within twenty years he had dismembered the empire. It was necessary therefore to start afresh from the familiar and established basis on which Bolingbroke had constructed his ideal system. If Frederick II. of Prussia showed the possible advantages which it contained, George III. of England proved its certain and unavoidable perils still more unmistakeably. Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, written |