few powerful men.  The king was but a puppet in leading strings.  The basis of government should be widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.  The Tories should be admitted to place.  They were now friendly to the accession and they no longer boasted their hostility to dissent.  They knew that Toleration and the Establishment were of the essence of the Constitution.  Were once the Whig oligarchy overthrown, corruption would cease and Parliament could no longer hope to dominate the kingdom.  “The ministers,” he said, “will depend on the Crown not the Crown on ministers” if George but showed “his resolution to break all factitious connections and confederacies.”  The tone is Bolingbroke’s, and it was the lesson George had insistently heard from early youth.  How sinister was the advice, men did not see until the elder Pitt was in political exile, with Wilkes an outlaw, and general warrants threatening the whole basis of past liberties.

The first writer who pointed out in unmistakable terms the meaning of the new synthesis was Junius.  That his anonymity concealed the malignant talent of Sir Philip Francis seems now beyond denial.  Junius, indeed, can hardly claim a place in the history of political ideas.  His genius lay not in the discussion of principle but the dissection of personality.  His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled him to inform the general public of facts which were the private possession of the inner political circle.  His mind was narrow and pedantic.  He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish.  He was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his calculations.  But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.  He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the unenfranchised populace of England.  His letters, moreover, appearing as they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics which it has never lost.  He made the significance of George’s effort known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information was at hand.  The opposition was divided; the king’s friends were in a vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.  English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.  It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system.  Not even the combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield’s doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation and Wilkes’ courage.  Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.