Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and, as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.  Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England required the absence of passionate debate if they were in any fruitful fashion to be solved.  Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be minimized.  It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.  Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century for the substance of political truths.  The American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements of justification.  The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her political system was compared with the governments of France and Germany.  Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was gathered.  The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the Extraordinary Black Book remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory party a new lease of power.  There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good of the governing class with the general welfare of the state.  It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make prosperity the mask for political stagnation.  He turned political debate from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the outcome of his cunning.

Not that this barrenness is without its compensations.  The theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation.  The constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance.  What was needed was the assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new rationalism on the other.  What was needed also was the expansion of English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of Chatham.  Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity.  Beneath the apparent calm of Walpole’s rule new forces were fast stirring.  That can be seen on every side.  The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier’s indignation, the revival of which Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep rather than death.  The needed events of shock were close at hand.  The people of England would never have discovered the real meaning