of them; ready to entertain notions of the military
power as incorporated with the constitution,--when you learn this in
the air of St. James's, then the business is done; then the House of
Commons will change that character which it receives from the people
only." It is hardly necessary to say that his motion for a Committee
was lost by the overwhelming majority of 245 against 30. The general
result of the proceedings of the Government from the accession of
George III. to the beginning of the troubles in the American colonies,
was in Burke's own words, that the Government was at once dreaded and
contemned; that the laws were despoiled of all their respected and
salutary terrors; that their inaction was a subject of ridicule, and
their exertion of abhorrence; that our dependencies had slackened
in their affections; that we knew neither how to yield, nor how to
enforce; and that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in parties,
in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevailed beyond the
disorders of any former time.

It was in the pamphlet on the _Present Discontents_, published in
1770, that Burke dealt at large with the whole scheme of policy of
which all these irregularities were the distempered incidents. The
pamphlet was composed as a manifesto of the Rockingham section of the
Whig party, to show, as Burke wrote to his chief, how different it
was in spirit and composition from "the Bedfords, the Grenvilles, and
other knots, who are combined for no public purpose, but only as a
means of furthering with joint strength their private and individual
advantage." The pamphlet was submitted in manuscript or proof to the
heads of the party. Friendly critics excused some inelegancies which
they thought they found in occasional passages, by taking for granted,
as was true, that he had admitted insertions from other hands. Here
for the first time he exhibited, on a conspicuous scale, the strongest
qualities of his understanding. Contemporaries had an opportunity of
measuring this strength, by comparison with another performance of
similar scope. The letters of Junius had startled the world the year
before. Burke was universally suspected of being their author, and the
suspicion never wholly died out so long as he lived. There was no real
ground for it beyond the two unconnected facts, that the letters were
powerful letters, and that Burke had a powerful intellect. Dr. Johnson
admitted that he had never had a better reas