England should have, if not an annual, at least a triennial parliament.  He acknowledges that the past in some degree unknown determines the present.  He has some not unhappy remarks upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger aspect than their immediate environment.  But his history is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy of citation.  Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration.  He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the clergy.  At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.  Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the real root of great changes.  And when he expresses a “thorough contempt” for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a knowledge of general principle can be attained.

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high notions of prerogative or the like.  The divine right of kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king important is the authority he exerts.  So, too, with the Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as the apostolic succession.  He makes great show of his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast solemnity of the “perpetual danger” in which it always stands.  So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained.  The social compact seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual independency.  But what the powers are, and how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the secret of English constitutional success.  We learn of the evil of standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments.  We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity.  The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted.  He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption.  He would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.