e succession to
his grandfathers crown. Bolingbroke betrayed the allies, and he
disgraced his country by the monopoly of the slave trade; but the
distribution was not unfair to the contracting parties, and the share
of England was not excessive. We acquired Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,
and the Hudson Bay territory, and, in addition to the asiento, the
right of trading in the possessions of the House of Bourbon--in fact,
the commerce of the world. And our revolutionary system, the
permanent exclusion of the Stuarts, received the sanction of Europe.
It was the condemnation of the principle of non-resistance, which had
carried the Tories to power, and the perpetuation of Whiggism.

Bolingbroke did not intend that the great achievement of his life
should serve the purpose of his enemies, and he gravitated towards the
Stuarts, the true representatives of the cause to which Sacheverell
had given renewed vitality. Harley had opened, through Berwick,
negotiations with St. Germains, and had thereby secured the help of
the Jacobite organisation. Bolingbroke went further. He believed
that the Elector of Hanover could not be prevented from coming in, but
that he would soon be driven out again. He said that he was too
unintelligent to understand and manage parties, too much accustomed to
have his own way to submit to govern under constitutional control. He
promised that King James would be restored. And the French concluded
peace at Utrecht in the belief that they were dealing with a Jacobite,
that their concession in regard to the crown of England amounted to
nothing, that, by yielding now, they would secure hereafter the
elevation of a dependent dynasty. Under that illusion they combined
with Bolingbroke to overreach themselves and to institute party
government, under the supremacy of the Whigs.

XVI

THE HANOVERIAN SETTLEMENT

THE FIRST thing is to consider by what steps a government came into
existence entirely different from that of England in the seventeenth
century, and unlike anything that had previously been known in Europe.

The old order terminates with the Bill of Rights and the Act of
Settlement. What followed is not a development of that Act, but in
contradiction to it. With the new dynasty there is a new departure.
And the change was not effected by statute, but by that force which
makes the law, and is above the law, the logic of facts and the
opinion of the nation. The essential innovations, the c