a hole.  Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.  Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the estate of bachelors.  The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole governed.  It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time.  An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate.  He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office.  One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility.  He maintained himself in office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically conceived.  An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.  The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it was Walpole’s ambition no less than policy to avoid.  From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in high dudgeon to France.  But in the years of his leadership he had evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the intellectual bankruptcy of the time.

To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember the peculiar character of his career.  He had attained to the highest office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien elements from the government.  But he had staked all his fortunes upon a scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed by his proscription.  Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King’s mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place.  His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole’s