'I believe in
George III.';--not a doctrine capable of philosophical justification.
Such Toryism meant the content of the rich and powerful with the
system by which their power and wealth were guaranteed. Their
instincts had been sharpened by the French revolution; and they saw in
any change the removal of one of the safeguards against a fresh
outburst of the nether fires. The great bulk of all political opinion
is an instinct, not a philosophy; and the obstructive Tories
represented little more than class prejudice and the dread of a great
convulsion. Yet intelligent Tories were being driven to find some
reasons for their creed, which the Utilitarians might have considered
more carefully.

III. CONSERVATISM

A famous man of letters represents certain tendencies more clearly
than the average politician. Robert Southey (1777-1843), the 'ultra
servile sack-guzzler,' as Bentham pleasantly calls him in 1823,[151]
was probably the best abused man, on his own side at least, among
Mill's contemporaries. He was attacked by Mill himself, and savagely
denounced by Byron and Hazlitt. He was not only a conspicuous writer
in the _Quarterly Review_ but, as his enemies thought, a renegade
bought by pensions. It is, I hope, needless to defend him against this
charge. He was simply an impatient man of generous instincts and no
reflective power, who had in his youth caught the revolutionary fever,
and, as he grew up, developed the patriotic fever.

Later views are given in the _Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects
of Society_ (1829), chiefly known to modern readers by one of
Macaulay's essays. Southey was as assailable as Mill. His political
economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted
by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and
disjointed. In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes
the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary
digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading
to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is in the
awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise. An Anglican
claiming infallibility is necessarily inconsistent. His view of
toleration, for example, is oddly obscure. He would apparently like to
persecute infidels;[152] and yet he wishes to denounce the Catholic
church for its persecuting principles. He seems to date the main
social evils to the changes which began at the Reformation, and