knots, who are combined for no public purpose, but only as a means of furthering with joint strength their private and individual advantage.”  The pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the heads of the party.  Friendly critics excused some inelegancies which they thought they found in occasional passages, by taking for granted, as was true, that he had admitted insertions from other hands.  Here for the first time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest qualities of his understanding.  Contemporaries had an opportunity of measuring this strength, by comparison with another performance of similar scope.  The letters of Junius had startled the world the year before.  Burke was universally suspected of being their author, and the suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived.  There was no real ground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters were powerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect.  Dr. Johnson admitted that he had never had a better reason for believing that Burke was Junius, than that he knew nobody else who had the ability of Junius.  But Johnson discharged his mind of the thought, at the instant that Burke voluntarily assured him that he neither wrote the letters of Junius, nor knew who had written them.  The subjects and aim of those famous pieces were not very different from Burke’s tract, but any one who in our time turns from the letters to the tract, will wonder how the author of the one could ever have been suspected of writing the other.  Junius is never more than a railer, and very often he is third-rate even as a railer.  The author of the Present Discontents speaks without bitterness even of Lord Bute and the Duke of Grafton; he only refers to persons, when their conduct or their situation illustrates a principle.  Instead of reviling, he probes, he reflects, he warns; and as the result of this serious method, pursued by a man in whom close mastery of detail kept exact pace with wide grasp of generalities, we have not the ephemeral diatribe of a faction, but one of the monumental pieces of political literature.

The last great pamphlet in the history of English public affairs had been Swift’s tract On the Conduct of the Allies (1711), in which the writer did a more substantial service for the Tory party of his day than Burke did for the Whig party of a later date.  Swift’s pamphlet is close, strenuous, persuasive, and full of telling strokes; but nobody need read it to-day except the historical student, or a member of the Peace Society, in search of the most convincing exposure of the most insane of English wars.[1] There is not a sentence in it which does not belong exclusively to the matter in hand:  not a line of that general wisdom which is for all time.  In the Present Discontents the method is just the opposite of this.  The details are slurred, and they are not literal.  Burke describes with excess of elaboration how the new system is a