detail
had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt
of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.
Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it
gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.
It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and
therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called
the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the
sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith
gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church
and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De
Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in
Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor
Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved
the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.
The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat
beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work
to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness. The
deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of
morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted
to provide it in social terms. It is, indeed, one of the primary
characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of
conduct rather than of thought. The seventeenth century had, for the
most part, been interested in theology and government; and its
preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its
conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism. Locke
regarded his _Human Understanding_ as the preliminary to an ethical
enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his _Principles of Morals_
the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of
Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been
represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been
periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be
inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of