time to
time its general shape and the relations of its various parts to the
varying circumstances of their natural developement. Nothing, in other
words, could be truer than Burke's political philosophy when the actual
state of things was good in itself, and its preservation a recognition
of the harmony of political institutions with political facts. But
nothing could be more unwise than his philosophy when he applied it to a
state of things which in itself was evil, and which was in fact a
defiance of the natural growth and adjustment of political power. It was
thus that he applied it to politics at home. He looked on the Revolution
of 1688 as the final establishment of English institutions. His aim was
to keep England as the Revolution had left it, and under the rule of the
great nobles who were faithful to the Revolution. Such a conviction left
him hostile to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to
the inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, an honest
man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check the corruption
of Parliament by a bill for civil retrenchment, but he took the lead in
defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was one of the few men in
England who understood the value of free industry, he struggled bitterly
against all proposals to give freedom to Irish trade, and against the
Commercial Treaty which the younger Pitt concluded with France. His work
seemed to be that of investing with a gorgeous poetry the policy of
timid content which the Whigs believed they inherited from Sir Robert
Walpole; and the very intensity of his trust in the natural developement
of a people rendered him incapable of understanding the good that might
come from particular or from special reforms.

It was this temper of Burke's mind which estranged him from Pitt. His
political sagacity had discerned that the true basis of the Whig party
must henceforth be formed in a combination of that "power drawn from
popularity" which was embodied in Pitt with the power which the Whig
families drew from political "connexion." But with Pitt's popular
tendencies Burke had no real sympathy. He looked on his eloquence as
mere rant; he believed his character to be hollow, selfish, and
insincere. Above all he saw in him with a true foreboding the
representative of forces before which the actual method of government
must go down. The popularity of Pitt in face of his Parliamentary
isolation was a