No revolution of modern times has been more complete than that which the last two centuries have silently wrought in the customary morality of British public life, and in the standards by which it is judged.  Under James I. every office of state was held as the private property of its occupant.  The highest places in the government were conferred only on condition of large payments to the King.  He openly sold the honors and dignities of which he was the source.  “The making of a baron,” that is, the right to sell to some rich plebeian a patent of nobility, was a common grant to favorites, and was actually bestowed on Bacon, to aid him in maintaining the state of his office.  We have the testimony of James himself that all the lawyers, of whom the judges of the realm were made, were “so bred and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it.”  But the line between what the King called corruption and that which he and all his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the regular work of government, is dim and hard to define.  The mind of the community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office as a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimulates and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred was still unformed.  The courts of justice were the first branch of the government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to respond to the demand for impersonal and impartial right.  But this process had only begun when Bacon, who had never before served as judge, was called to preside in Chancery.  The Chancellor’s office was a gradual development:  originally political and administrative rather than judicial, and with no salary or reward for hearing causes, save the voluntary presents of suitors who asked its interference with the ordinary courts, it step by step became the highest tribunal of the equity which limits and corrects the routine of law, and still the custom of gifts was unchecked.  A careful study of Bacon’s career shows that in this, as every other branch of thought, his theoretic convictions were in advance of his age; and in his advice to the King and in his inaugural promises as Chancellor, he foreshadows all the principles on which the wisest reformers of the public service now insist.  But he failed to apply them with that heroic self-sacrifice which alone would have availed him, and the forces of custom and example continually encroached upon his views of duty.  Having through a long life sought advancement and wealth for the purpose of using leisure and independence to carry out his beneficent plans on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the traditional emoluments of his new position, in the conviction that they would become in his hands the means of vast good to mankind.  It was only the public exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the inconsistency and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his severest judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most unreserved confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing could be added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the noblest work for humanity.