and
accepting Revolution principles. By 1760 all peril to the dynasty was at an
end. George III., or those about him, insisted on substituting for the
aristocratic division of political power a substantial concentration of it
in the hands of the sovereign. The ministers were no longer to be the
members of a great party, acting together in pursuance of a common policy
accepted by them all as a united body; they were to become nominees of the
court, each holding himself answerable not to his colleagues but to the
king, separately, individually and by department. George III. had before
his eyes the government of his cousin the great Frederick; but not every
one can bend the bow of Ulysses, and, apart from difference of personal
capacity and historic tradition, he forgot that a territorial and
commercial aristocracy cannot be dealt with in the spirit of the barrack
and the drill-ground. But he made the attempt, and resistance to that
attempt supplies the keynote to the first twenty-five years of Burke's
political life.

Along with the change in system went high-handed and absolutist tendencies
in policy. The first stage of the new experiment was very short. Bute, in a
panic at the storm of unpopularity that menaced him, resigned in 1763.
George Grenville and the less enlightened section of the Whigs took his
place. They proceeded to tax the American colonists, to interpose
vexatiously against their trade, to threaten the liberty of the subject at
home by general warrants, and to stifle the liberty of public discussion by
prosecutions of the press. Their arbitrary methods disgusted the nation,
and the personal arrogance of the ministers at last disgusted the king. The
system received a temporary check. Grenville fell, and the king was forced
to deliver himself into the hands of the orthodox section of the Whigs. The
marquess of Rockingham (July 10, 1765) became prime minister, and he was
induced to make Burke his private secretary. Before Burke had begun his
duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two
men. The old duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee
of his own, conveyed to the ear of the new minister various absurd rumours
prejudicial to Burke,--that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was
O'Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St
Omer's. Lord Rockingham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied
them with indignation. His chief de