system of double cabinets; one put forward with nominal powers in Parliament, the other concealed behind the throne, and secretly dictating the policy.  The reader feels that this is worked out far too closely to be real.  It is a structure of artificial rhetoric.  But we lightly pass this over, on our way to more solid matter; to the exposition of the principles of a constitution, the right methods of statesmanship, and the defence of party.

[Footnote 1:  This was not Burke’s judgment on the long war against Louis XIV.—­See Regicide Peace, i.]

It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was thinking, when he sat down to the composition of his tract.  The Patriot King was the fountain of the new doctrines, which Burke trained his party to understand and to resist.  If his foe was domestic, it was from a foreign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of resistance.  The great fault of political writers is their too close adherence to the forms of the system of state which they happen to be expounding or examining.  They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not penetrate to the secret of their functions.  An illustrious author in the middle of the eighteenth century introduced his contemporaries to a better way.  It is not too much to say that at that epoch the strength of political speculation in this country, from Adam Smith downwards, was drawn from France; and Burke had been led to some of what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society by Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (1748), the first great manual of the historic school.  We have no space here to work out the relations between Montesquieu’s principles and Burke’s, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will recognise its influence in every one of Burke’s masterpieces.

So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was quick to discern their true interpretation.  As has been already said, he attributed to the king and his party a deliberateness of system which probably had no real existence in their minds.  The king intended to reassert the old right of choosing his own ministers.  George II. had made strenuous but futile endeavours to the same end.  His son, the father of George III., Frederick, Prince of Wales, as every reader of Dodington’s Diary will remember, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the great Whig combinations, and making his own cabinets.  George III. was only continuing the purpose of his father and his grandfather; and there is no reason to believe that he went more elaborately to work to obtain his ends.

It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes down below the surface to the working of deep social forces, that we feel the breadth and power of Burke’s method.  “I am not one of those,” he began, “who think that the people are never wrong.  They have been so, frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this.  But I do say that in all disputes between them