y to
confound the private good of the governing class with the general
welfare of the state. It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make
prosperity the mask for political stagnation. He turned political debate
from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the
outcome of his cunning.

Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of
the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The
constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an
England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the
rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the
assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in
the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new
rationalism on the other. What was needed also was the expansion of
English commerce into the new channels opened for it by the victories of
Chatham. Mr. Chief Justice Holt had given it the legal categories it
would require; and Hume and Adam Smith were to explain that commerce
might grow with small danger to agricultural prosperity. Beneath the
apparent calm of Walpole's rule new forces were fast stirring. That can
be seen on every side. The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary
forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon
the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law
and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the stagnation was sleep
rather than death. The needed events of shock were close at hand. The
people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688
if George III had not denied its principles. When he enforced the
resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and
English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the
_Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a
splendid recovery. And they made possible the speculative ferment which
showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and
Rousseau. Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor
despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of
the eighteenth century. But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of
the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth
century which made possible the birth of democratic England.

The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the c