be issued.  “A new party of malcontents” had arisen, “assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People.”  They affect, he tells us, “superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves.”  The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English radicalism.

[Footnote 16:  It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]

Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive effort.  David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742) the first series of his essays; and his Treatise of Human Nature which had fallen “dead-born from the press” was in some sort compensated by the success of the new work.  The second part, entitled Political Discourses, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the “Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.”  As in the case of Hume’s metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful dissolvent the century was to see.  Yet nowhere was so clearly to be demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.

Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.  There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right and the social contract.  The one is an inevitable deduction from theism, but it protects an usurper not less than an hereditary king, and gives a “divine commission” as well to a constable as to the most majestic prince.  The proponents of the social contract are in no better case.  “Were you to preach,” he remarks, “in most parts of the world that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent, or on a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you as seditious for loosening the ties of obedience; if your friends did not before shut you up as delirious for advancing such absurdities.”  The original contract could not be produced, and, even if it were, it would suppose the “consent of the fathers to bind the children even to the most remote generations.”  The real truth, as he remarks, is that “almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally on usurpation, or on conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.”  If we then ask why obedience is possible, the sufficient answer is that “it becomes so familiar that most men never make any inquiry about its origin or cause, any more than about the principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature.”