re the body politic 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