is diseased.  Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice.  Johnson’s attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to contribute.  Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.

CHAPTER VI

BURKE

I

It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict.  He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle.  The merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has passed.  The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated nullification of the Crown.  Yet the first twenty-five years of George III’s reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the balance of power.  Nor was the effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.

And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time highly favorable to its success.  Party government had lost much credit during Walpole’s administration.  Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power.  A generation of corrupt practice and the final defeat of Stuart hopes had already deprived the Whigs of any special hold on their past ideals.  They were divided already into factions the purpose of which was no more than the avid pursuit of place and pension.  Government by connection proved itself irreconcilable with good government.  But it showed also that once corruption was centralized there was no limit to its influence, granted only the absence of great questions.  When George III transferred that organization from the office of the minister to his own court, there was already a tolerable certainty of his success.  For more than forty years the Tories had been excluded from office; and they were more than eager to sell their support.  The Church had become the creature of the State.  The drift of opinion in continental Europe was towards benevolent despotism.  The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert.  He had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke’s glowing picture; and a reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone’s first book can only have confirmed the ideals he found there.  Nor was it obvious that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the great Whig families.