There have been few men in history with whom personal objects counted for so little as they counted with Burke.  He really did what so many public men only feign to do.  He forgot that he had any interests of his own to be promoted, apart from the interests of the party with which he acted, and from those of the whole nation, for which he held himself a trustee.  What William Burke said of him in 1766 was true throughout his life, “Ned is full of real business, intent upon doing solid good to his country, as much as if he was to receive twenty per cent from the Empire.”  Such men as the shrewd and impudent Bigby atoned for a plebeian origin by the arts of dependence and a judicious servility, and drew more of the public money from the pay-office in half a dozen quarter-days than Burke received in all his life.  It was not by such arts that Burke rose.  When we remember all the untold bitterness of the struggle in which he was engaged, from the time when the old Duke of Newcastle tried to make the Marquis of Rockingham dismiss his new private secretary as an Irish Jesuit in disguise (1765), down to the time when the Duke of Bedford, himself battening “in grants to the house of Russell, so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility,” assailed the Government for giving Burke a moderate pension, we may almost imagine that if Johnson had imitated the famous Tenth Satire a little later, he would have been tempted to apply the poet’s cynical criticism of the career heroic to the greater Cicero of his own day.  “I was not,” Burke said, in a passage of lofty dignity, “like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator; Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me.  I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great.  I was not made for a minion or a tool.  As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings of the people.  At every step of my progress in life, for in every step was I traversed and opposed, and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home; otherwise no rank, no toleration even for me.”

CHAPTER III

THE CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE

Foreign observers of our affairs looked upon the state of England between the accession of George III. and the loss of the American colonies (1760-76) with mixed disgust and satisfaction.  Their instinct as absolute rulers was revolted by a spectacle of unbridled faction and raging anarchy; their envy was soothed by the growing weakness of a power which Chatham had so short a time before left at the highest point of grandeur and strength.