er related to legal facts or to
political possibility. They pursued relentlessly the logical conclusions
of the doctrines they abhorred without being willing carefully to
investigate the results to which their own doctrines in logic led. They
overestimated the extent to which men are willing to occupy themselves
with political affairs. They made no proper allowance for the protective
armour each social system must acquire by the mere force of
prescription. Nor is there sufficient allowance in their attitude for
those limiting conditions of circumstance of which every statesman must
of necessity take account. They occupy themselves, that is to say, so
completely with _staatslehre_ that they do not admit the mollifying
influence of _politik_. They search for principles of universal right,
without the perception that a right which is to be universal must
necessarily be so general in character as to be useless in its
application.

Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their
insight. They were protesting against a system strongly upheld on
grounds which now appear to have been simply indefensible. The business
of government had been made the private possession of a privileged
class; and eagerness for desirable change was, in the mass, absent from
the minds of most men engaged in its direction. The loss of America, the
heartless treatment of Ireland, the unconstitutional practices in the
Wilkes affair, the heightening of corruption undertaken by Henry Fox and
North at the direct instance of the king, had blinded the eyes of most
to the fact that principle is a vital part of policy. The revolutionists
recalled men to the need of explaining, no less than carrying on, the
government of the Crown. They represented the new sense of power felt by
elements of which the importance had been forgotten in the sordid
intrigues of the previous half-century. Their emphasis upon government
as in its nature a public trust was at least accompanied by a useful
reminder that, after all, ultimate power must rest upon the side of the
governed. For twenty years Whigs and Tories alike carried on political
controversy as though no public opinion existed outside the small circle
of the aristocracy. The mob which made Wilkes its idol was, in a blind
and unconscious way, enforcing the lesson that Price and Priestley had
in mind. For the moment, they were unsuccessful. Cartwright, with his
Constitutional Societies, might capture