squandered away without any public utility.  He admitted, moreover, on the other hand, that people frequently acquired in party confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit.  “But where duty renders a critical situation a necessary one, it is our business to keep free from the evils attendant upon it, and not to fly from the situation itself.  It is surely no very rational account of a man that he has always acted right, but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence....  When men are not acquainted with each other’s, principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts of business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy.”

In terms of eloquent eulogy he praised the sacred reverence with which the Romans used to regard the necessitudo sortis, or the relations that grew up between men who had only held office together by the casual fortune of the lot.  He pointed out to emulation the Whig junto who held so close together in the reign of Anne—­Sunderland, Godolphin, Somers, and Marlborough—­who believed “that no men could act with effect who did not act in concert; that no men could act in concert who did not act with confidence; and that no men could act with confidence who were not bound together by common opinions, common affections, and common interests.”  In reading these energetic passages, we have to remember two things:  first, that the writer assumes the direct object of party combination to be generous, great, and liberal causes; and second, that when the time came, and when he believed that his friends were espousing a wrong and pernicious cause, Burke, like Samson bursting asunder the seven green withes, broke away from the friendships of a life, and deliberately broke his party in pieces.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See on the same subject, Correspondence, ii. 276, 277.]

When Burke came to discuss the cure for the disorders of 1770, he insisted on contenting himself with what he ought to have known to be obviously inadequate prescriptions.  And we cannot help feeling that he never speaks of the constitution of the government of this country, without gliding into a fallacy identical with that which he himself described and denounced, as thinking better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserved.  He was uniformly consistent in his view of the remedies which the various sections of Opposition proposed against the existing debasement and servility of the Lower House.  The Duke of Richmond wanted universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual parliaments.  Wilkes proposed to disfranchise the rotten boroughs, to increase the county constituencies, and to give