it is the man himself.  His genius, as his metaphysics show, lay essentially in his power of destruction; and the man who gave solipsism to philosophy was not likely to effect a new creation in politics.  In part, also, the condition of the time gave little stimulus to novelty.  Herein Hume was born a generation too early.  Had he written when George III attempted the destruction of the system of the Revolution, and when America and France combined to raise again the basic questions of politics, he might have done therein what Adam Smith effected in his own field.  But the time had not yet come; and it was left to Burke and Bentham to reap where he had sown.

CHAPTER V

SIGNS OF CHANGE

I

From Hume until the publication of Burke’s Present Discontents (1770) there is no work on English politics of the first importance.  Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene.  It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the accession of George III.  Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the standing model.  The signs of change are in each instance slight, though collectively they acquire significance.  It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory.  Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride.  In the House of Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a new age has come.  It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent.

So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change.  Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole’s administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw.  Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience.  Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the Contrat Social it was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought.  The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective