Such an age could make but little pretence to discovery; and, indeed, it is most largely absent from its speculation.  In its political ideas this is necessarily and especially the case.  For the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment.  That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules.  There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power.  That is with most men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament.  What balance of forces is necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George III forgets the result of half a century’s evolution.  Junius may have to explain in invective what Burke magistrally demonstrated in terms of political philosophy.  But the deeper problems of the state lay hidden until Bentham and the revolutionists came to insist upon their presence.  That did not mean that the eighteenth century was a soulless failure.  Rather did it mean that a period of transition had been successfully bridged.  The stage was set for a new effort simply because the theories of the older philosophy no longer represented the facts at issue.

It was thus Locke only in this period who confronted the general problems of the modern State.  Other thinkers assumed his structure and dealt with the details he left undetermined.  The main problems, the Church apart, arose when a foreigner occupied the English throne and left the methods of government to those who were acquainted with them.  That most happy of all the happy accidents in English history made Walpole the fundamental statesman of the time.  He used his opportunity to the full.  Inheriting the possibilities of the cabinet system he gave it its modern expression by creating the office of Prime Minister.  The party-system was already inevitable; and with his advent to full power in 1727 we have the characteristic outlines of English representative government.  Thenceforward, there are, on the whole, but three large questions with which the age concerned itself.  Toleration had already been won by the persistent necessities of two generations, and the noble determination of William III; but the place of the Church in the Revolution State and the nature of that State were still undetermined.  Hoadly had one solution, Law another; and the genial rationalism of the time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party, combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in each succeeding century the leaders.  America presented again the problem of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism