forms of popular government can be filled with the lifegiving spirit of popular action.

It was well that the first motion towards a better order should make itself felt in the domain of religion rather than in that of politics. The thought of the time had little reference to action, and none at all to spiritual ardour and emotion. Around the thinkers who speculated on the comfortable results of the Christian scheme were a large number of clergy who did not speculate at all, but who contented themselves with fulfilling the external functions of their office in a more or less respectable way, without dreaming that it was their duty to utter more than a mild protest against the evils around them. The one word which expressed to them all that was to be avoided was the word 'zeal.' They were in the midst of masses who were mere heathens, living lives utterly brutal and degraded, and they passed on their way as if these things had no existence. John Wesley saw the sight with other eyes. He gave his life to raise these very masses to a higher and a nobler life. There was in his teaching nothing new. It was the old Puritan doctrine of conversion, upon which was grafted the practice of confession from the yet older church, stripped of its sacerdotalism, and assuming a democratic form in the class-meetings by means of which he organised his followers. In his hands the old thing had become new. His work was more than to teach and to organise. It was to quicken into vigour the seeds of spiritual life which had been almost smothered under the oppressive reasoning of the philosopher and the careless self-content of the man of the world. From it sprang the work of the later evangelical leaders within the English Church, and indirectly the whole spiritual teaching of men who would be by no

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§ 2. Wes

leyanism.

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$3. William Pitt.

means inclined to trace their mental genealogy to the founder of Wesleyanism.

What Wesley was in the region of mind and spirit, William Pitt was in the region of politics. He too brought nothing new in the way of intellectual conception. His ruling idea of antagonism to France was as old as the days of Edward III. and of Henry V. It was enshrined in the historic drama of Shakspere, and it inspired the foreign policy of the Whigs of the Revolution. When he tried to solve the questions evolved by the resistance of America to English taxation, he fell back on the old doctrine of No taxation without representation, which had been heard in the midst of the Puritan revolution. Pitt's strength lay in his character, not in his ideas. The spectacle of a man who set before him noble ends, and who trusted his countrymen above that which they were able to do, roused them to do more than they had done before. The first step in organisation is to rally round a man, and in Pitt, England had at last found the man to whom it could look up. It was only to be expected that that rally should have been the accompaniment of a great war. It is for the purposes war that the need of leadership is most promptly felt, and that need which at an earlier stage of civilisation is satisfied by a quick eye and a brave heart in the field, demands, when war is spread over a larger field, a quick eye and a brave heart in the cabinet. The successes of the Seven Years' War, the conquest of Canada, and the establishment of English military power in India were the distinct results of the individual energy and vigour which the race had gained by its development in the seventeenth century. Frenchmen, in spite of such glorious exceptions as Montcalm and Dupleix, were through their long training under an absolute monarchy, unfitted to compete with the great-grandchildren of the

of

freeholders who supported Hampden, and of the Puritans who charged with Cromwell.

The influence of the character of a single man is evanescent. Nor was it in the nature of things that England should be swayed by Pitt in peace as it had been swayed by him in war. As long as the war lasted, the hearts of all were set upon the one object of beating the enemy. When the war was at an end, the mass of men became very much what they had been before it. Petty objects took the place of great ones, and intrigues resumed their empire over public spirit. The idea of a State watching over its fleets and armies had been easily seized. The idea of a State watching over the welfare of the population at home, and binding them into common action for great social ends was as yet unfamiliar. In such a dormant condition of public feeling men's advantages were the measure of their power. Whig aristocracy once more threatened to seize authority into their hands. But the Whig aristocracy was not quite what it was before. It had split into various fractions combating one another for power, and some of its members had learned something by their temporary combination with the ostentatious purity of Pitt. was otherwise with the bulk of members of Parliament who still called themselves Whigs. If they no longer took bribes in the more degrading form of money presents, they did not hesitate to take bribes in the shape of pensions and places, and they flung away in gambling and debauchery the money which they thus acquired at the expense of the nation.

The

It

'Accession of George

III.

When the great landowners were divided amongst § 5. The themselves, it was possible for the crown to assert a claim to a higher position than had been allowed to it since the days of Anne. At first indeed the royal competition for power only brought one more rival on

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the scene to appeal to the covetousness of mankind. The young king, George III., who ascended the throne in 1760, was indeed possessed of a strong desire to do his duty as a ruler, and of a firm conviction that he and not the great landowners was the rightful centre of authority. But he won his way, not by the possession of high qualifications for government, but by persistency of effort joined to the advantage of position. If he exercised his legal rights, he had more to give away than Newcastle and his allies. Places and pensions had all along nominally been in the gift of the Crown. When it was once understood that the King meant really to allot them himself, he soon found that he could dispose of votes in parliament, which had hitherto been at the disposal of the prime minister. Yet the Whig domination was not to be overthrown at once. In bringing about peace with France when everything had been achieved to which the nation could fairly lay claim, George III. was in the right. But in the struggle which followed between the king and the Whig landowners little was to be seen except a contest for power. One body of them, indeed, which placed itself under the leadership of Rockingham, set a noble example in renouncing the paths of corruption. But for that very reason it was weak in Parliamentary influence, and it failed to convey the impression that its chief spokesmen were possessed of sufficient firmness or ability to be entrusted with the destinies of the nation. When its leaders held office for a few short months, they had against them both the hostility of the King, who disliked them as a party formed independently of himself, and the hostility of those numerous members of Parliament who had made their way into the House of Commons in order to be heavily bribed. At last, when after various defeats and victories the King selected Pitt-now Earl of Chatham-as his Prime Minister, there seemed a chance

that the weight of hereditary authority was about to add to itself the weight of the instinctive virtues of the great popular statesman. But Chatham's failure of health prevented the fair trial of the experiment, and George went his way combating influence by influence and, so far as he fell back upon popular support at all, falling back upon that ignorance and the selfishness of his countrymen in which he shared.

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X.

The influence of an hereditary king, or of a popular §6. Edstatesman, was a great organising power capable of pro- Burke.. ducing harmonious action for a time. But the great organiser of modern states is scientific political knowledge, and the first man to appreciate its force was Edmund Burke. He was the founder of a new school of politics. Throwing aside the older doctrines, he announced that it was the duty of governments, not to vindicate their own rights, or to aim at an ideal good, but simply to limit their action for the benefit of their subjects by the extent of their power. The ruler was to ask not what was in itself just, but what was expedient. To give full weight to this doctrine of expediency it would have been necessary for him to anticipate the still more modern doctrine that a nation changes its habits only at a very slow rate, which it is out of the power of any government, either to accelerate very much, or to retard very much. Such a doctrine leads inevitably to the extension of popular control, as a regulating influence upon the freaks of individual selfishness or the overhastiness of individual intelligence. Burke was too much a child of the first half of the eighteenth century to look upon the influence of the masses as anything but an evil. Thinking, far-sighted men, were, as he well knew, but a small minority. The mass of Englishmen was without education of the simplest kind. Very few could even read or write. It was impossible for ignorant persons engaged in a daily struggle for existence to under