freeholders who supported Hampden, and of the Puritans who charged with Cromwell.

CHAP,

X.

Decline of the Whig

tocracy.

The influence of the character of a single man is $4. The evanescent. Nor was it in the nature of things that England should be swayed by Pitt in peace as it had Arisbeen swayed by him in war. As long as the war lasted, the hearts of all were set upon the one object of beating the enemy. When the war was at an end, the mass of men became very much what they had been before it, Petty objects took the place of great ones, and intrigues resumed their empire over public spirit. The idea of a State watching over its fleets and armies had been easily seized. The idea of a State watching over the welfare of the population at home, and binding them into common action for great social ends was as yet unfamiliar. In such a dormant condition of public feeling men's advantages were the measure of their power. The Whig aristocracy once more threatened to seize authority into their hands. But the Whig aristocracy was not quite what it was before. It had split into various frac- tions combating one another for power, and some of its members had learned something by their temporary combination with the ostentatious purity of Pitt. was otherwise with the bulk of members of Parliament who still called themselves Whigs. If they no longer took bribes in the more degrading form of money presents, they did not hesitate to take bribes in the shape of pensions and places, and they flung away in gambling and debauchery the money which they thus acquired at the expense of the nation.

It

Accession of George

III.

When the great landowners were divided amongst § 5. The themselves, it was possible for the crown to assert a claim to a higher position than had been allowed to it since the days of Anne. At first indeed the royal competition for power only brought one more rival on

СНАР.

X.

the scene to appeal to the covetousness of mankind. The young king, George III., who ascended the throne in 1760, was indeed possessed of a strong desire to do his duty as a ruler, and of a firm conviction that he and not the great landowners was the rightful centre of authority. But he won his way, not by the possession of high qualifications for government, but by persistency of effort joined to the advantage of position. If he exercised his legal rights, he had more to give away than Newcastle and his allies. Places and pensions had all along nominally been in the gift of the Crown. When it was once understood that the King meant really to allot them himself, he soon found that he could dispose of votes in parliament, which had hitherto been at the disposal of the prime minister. Yet the Whig domination was not to be overthrown at once. In bringing about peace with France when everything had been achieved to which the nation could fairly lay claim, George III. was in the right. But in the struggle which followed between the king and the Whig landowners little was to be seen except a contest for power. One body of them, indeed, which placed itself under the leadership of Rockingham, set a noble example in renouncing the paths of corruption. But for that very reason it was weak in Parliamentary influence, and it failed to convey the impression that its chief spokesmen were possessed of sufficient firmness or ability to be entrusted with the destinies of the nation. When its leaders held office for a few short months, they had against them both the hostility of the King, who disliked them as a party formed independently of himself, and the hostility of those numerous members of Parliament who had made their way into the House of Commons in order to be heavily bribed. At last, when after various defeats and victories the King selected Pitt-now Earl of Chatham-as his Prime Minister, there seemed a chance

that the weight of hereditary authority was about to add to itself the weight of the instinctive virtues of the great popular statesman. But Chatham's failure of health prevented the fair trial of the experiment, and George went his way combating influence by influence and, so far as he fell back upon popular support at all, falling back upon that ignorance and the selfishness of his countrymen in which he shared.

СНАР.
X.

mund

The influence of an hereditary king, or of a popular §6. Edstatesman, was a great organising power capable of pro- Burke. ducing harmonious action for a time. But the great organiser of modern states is scientific political knowledge, and the first man to appreciate its force was Edmund Burke. He was the founder of a new school of politics. Throwing aside the older doctrines, he announced that it was the duty of governments, not to vindicate their own rights, or to aim at an ideal good, but simply to limit their action for the benefit of their subjects by the extent of their power. The ruler was to ask not what was in itself just, but what was expedient. To give full weight to this doctrine of expediency it would have been necessary for him to anticipate the still more modern doctrine that a nation changes its habits only at a very slow rate, which it is out of the power of any government, either to accelerate very much, or to retard very much. Such a doctrine leads inevitably to the extension of popular control, as a regulating influence upon the freaks of individual selfishness or the overhastiness of individual intelligence. Burke was too much a child of the first half of the eighteenth century to look upon the influence of the masses as anything but an evil. Thinking, far-sighted men, were, as he well knew, but a small minority. The mass of Englishmen was without education of the simplest kind. Very few could even read or write. It was impossible for ignorant persons engaged in a daily struggle for existence to under

CHAP.

X.

stand what was politically wise or politically foolish. Chatham's notion of appealing to the popular voice was therefore as much discarded by him as the king's notion of gaining support by a judicious distribution of offices and pensions. Yet there must be somewhere a body of men to whom was to be entrusted the task of determining what was politically expedient, of seeing that certain things must not be done because the mass of men, whom it would be folly to consult, would testify their objections by practical resistance. But for one peculiarity in Burke's mind, it would have been hard for him to discover where his basis of operations was to be found. When once his antipathies were roused, he was never very critical of the instruments to which he had recourse to oppose that which he disliked. With all his activity of thought in devising new measures, perhaps even on account of that very activity, he was eminently conservative as regarded institutions. He therefore looked for aid not to that which might be, but to that which actually existed, to the parliamentary strength of the Whig landowners. Not that Burke wished to see the government of England placed entirely in the hands of a few noble or wealthy families. He took parliament as it was, with its county-members elected by the freeholders, and with most of its borough-members practically chosen by a limited number of landowners, and with a few of them chosen by a very wide suffrage indeed. Above all he advocated giving the fullest publicity to the words and acts of parliament. Indirectly, every man who had an opinion to express might bring his influence to bear on parliament, though he might never vote at an election. Directly, the mass was to stand aside. The men of wealth and position who had an interest in good government, and who had sufficient intelligence to know what it was, ought to band themselves together by party

ties to resist alike the corrupt influence of the Crown and the ignorant violence of the populace. Such in the main became the creed of the Whigs who looked up to Rockingham as their leader, and of the Rockingham Whigs Burke was the guiding spirit.

CHAP.

X.

of Wilkes,

and American

On two points Burke was able to co-operate with Chat- §7. The ham, though not without certain reservations. When Expulsion Wilkes, after being expelled from the Lower House, was, upon a mere resolution of the single House of Commons, Taxation. declared to be incapable of holding his seat by re-election, Burke like Chatham pronounced against the usurpation. If parliament was not to be brought under the control of a wider constituency than it possessed, at least it must not shake off the control of such constituencies as already existed. Burke went a long way in that idolatry of parliament which was the besetting sin of the middle of the eighteenth century, but he was unable to go so far as to hold that the House of Commons was entitled to set at defiance those to whom it owed its existence. In the question of American taxation, Burke was less unreservedly in agreement with Chatham. Chatham held that the British Parliament had no right to tax America, because America was not represented in it. Burke refused to admit that the question was one of right at all. In his eyes it was one of expediency, one, in short, for the exercise of discretion by the central governing power of the empire, and that central governing power was the British Parliament. It would be an element of considerable importance in the formation of the judgment of Parliament that the Americans objected to be taxed; but it was not the sole element to be taken into consideration. He, therefore, wished to retain for parliament the power of taxing the colonies, whilst counselling that, excepting in extreme emergencies, that power should never be put in force.