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stand what was politically wise or politically foolish. Chatham's notion of appealing to the popular voice was therefore as much discarded by him as the king's notion of gaining support by a judicious distribution of offices and pensions. Yet there must be somewhere a body of men to whom was to be entrusted the task of determining what was politically expedient, of seeing that certain things must not be done because the mass of men, whom it would be folly to consult, would testify their objections by practical resistance. But for one peculiarity in Burke's mind, it would have been hard for him to discover where his basis of operations was to be found. When once his antipathies were roused, he was never very critical of the instruments to which he had recourse to oppose that which he disliked. With all his activity of thought in devising new measures, perhaps even on account of that very activity, he was eminently conservative as regarded institutions. He therefore looked for aid not to that which might be, but to that which actually existed, to the parliamentary strength of the Whig landowners. Not that Burke wished to see the government of England placed entirely in the hands of a few noble or wealthy families. He took parliament as it was, with its county-members elected by the freeholders, and with most of its borough-members practically chosen by a limited number of landowners, and with a few of them chosen by a very wide suffrage indeed. Above all he advocated giving the fullest publicity to the words and acts of parliament. Indirectly, every man who had an opinion to express might bring his influence to bear on parliament, though he might never vote at an election. Directly, the mass was to stand aside. The men of wealth and position who had an interest in good government, and who had sufficient intelligence to know what it was, ought to band themselves together by party

ties to resist alike the corrupt influence of the Crown and the ignorant violence of the populace. Such in the main became the creed of the Whigs who looked up to Rockingham as their leader, and of the Rockingham Whigs Burke was the guiding spirit.

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X.

American

On two points Burke was able to co-operate with Chat- §7. The Expulsion ham, though not without certain reservations. When of Wilkes, Wilkes, after being expelled from the Lower House, was, and upon a mere resolution of the single House of Commons, Taxation. declared to be incapable of holding his seat by re-election, Burke like Chatham pronounced against the usurpation. If parliament was not to be brought under the control. of a wider constituency than it possessed, at least it must not shake off the control of such constituencies as already existed. Burke went a long way in that idolatry of parliament which was the besetting sin of the middle of the eighteenth century, but he was unable to go so far as to hold that the House of Commons was entitled to set at defiance those to whom it owed its existence. ' In the question of American taxation, Burke was less unreservedly in agreement with Chatham. Chatham held that the British Parliament had no right to tax America, because America was not represented in it. Burke refused to admit that the question was one of right at all. In his eyes it was one of expediency, one, in short, for the exercise of discretion by the central governing power of the empire, and that central governing power was the British Parliament. It would be an element of considerable importance in the formation of the judgment of Parliament that the Americans objected to be taxed; but it was not the sole element to be taken into consideration. He, therefore, wished to retain for parliament the power of taxing the colonies, whilst counselling that, excepting in extreme emergencies, that power should never be put in force.

CHAP.

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parison between

Burke and

Bacon.

Burke's political opinions, in short, were very similar to those of Bacon, if only the authority of parliament were § 8. Com- substituted for the authority of the crown. The predominance of the crown with Bacon-the predominance of the parliament with Burke-was the form in which intelligence was to bear sway over ignorance. Neither of these great men dreamed for a moment of shutting his ears to the voices of those who were excluded from any actual part in the government. But they thought that those voices should be raised simply to enlighten those higher powers, which, unless they were given over, to folly or madness, would be able, from the vantage ground on which they sto. to take an impartial view of all questions at issue. In both cases the theory broke down in precisely the same way. The Stuart kings proved unable to rise above the limitations of ordinary human self-conceit and ignorance, and the history of the seventeenth century proved that the place for the action of intelligence must be found in the midst of the representatives of the nation, and not in some separate sphere, the motions of which were governed by rules and forces of its own. The lesson of the eighteenth century was precisely the same. The House of Commons, elected as Burke wished it to be always elected, and endowed with all those powers with which Burke wished it to be endowed, turned a deaf ear to the warnings and exhortations of the great philosophical statesman of that day, as James I. had turned a deaf ear to the warnings and exhortations of Bacon. It shared to the full in the ignorance and corruption of its generation, and its members thus sank into subservient instruments of a king who had honours and rewards to bestow. It used the power, which Burke ascribed to it, of taxing the colonies in special emergencies, to tax them when there was no emergency at all, just as Charles I. had used the

special powers entrusted to him for the defence of the nation at a time of grave and unexpected danger, to lay on ship-money when there was no such danger to be feared. It hurried England into an uncalled-for and hopeless war with America, just as Charles I. hurried England into an uncalled-for and hopeless war with Spain and France. It is not likely that the immediate. realisation of Chatham's idea of electoral reform would have brought about at once a better state of things, any more than the immediate realisation of Eliot's idea of parliamentary predominance would have brought about at once a better state of things. Much gradual political education was necessary before the House of Commons was fit to take the lead in the seventeenth century, or before any wide popular foundations would be fitted. to bear up the edifice of government in the eighteenth century. But it was on the side of Chatham's ideas rather than on the side of Burke's that the hopes of the future lay, if it were only for this reason—that Burke's principles excluded the popular leadership of Chatham, whilst Chatham's principles would find ample room for the intellectual guidance of Burke.

The imposition of taxation upon America was undoubtedly popular at first. Englishmen believed that the seven years war had assigned to them, not the empire, but the booty of the world. Partly from a desire to escape from its own burdens, partly from contemptuous ignorance of the feelings of the colonists, in the first stages of the quarrel the nation took the side of the king. Instead of correcting the errors of king and people, the House of Commons shared them. Nothing in history is more remarkable than the way in which, excepting in the very greatest crises, any ministry was sure of a majority in the House of Commons. There was a majority for the imposition of the American

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$9. The new Tories.

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§ 10. The American War.

Stamp Act in 1765. There was a majority for repealing it in 1766; and there was again a majority for taxing duties upon imports into America in 1767. Even as late as in 1788, when a great minister, strong in the confidence of the crown and the nation, was threatened with removal from office through accidental causes, it never occurred either to his friends or his opponents that, if a new ministry succeeded in establishing itself in office, it would find any difficulty in securing a majority in the House of Commons. In part, the phenomenon was owing to the corrupt influence which the wearer of the crown was able to exercise, but, in the first years of the reign, it was also owing to the general weariness of the domination of the Whigs, and a desire to find in the king a rallying point of national strength. When the American war came, he became the rallying point of national stubbornness as well. Hence the success achieved by George III. in the formation of that new Tory party which came into power with Lord North in 1770. The party thus formed was no longer beset by the difficulties which had weakened those politicians who had gloried in the name of Tory in the reign of Anne. There was no longer any disputed succession. The questions springing out of the Toleration Act had long been laid asleep. It was a party simply gathered in hostility to the great Whig houses, and advocating, as the cardinal point of its political creed, the right of the king to name his own ministers, and thereby to direct the policy of the government, though it did not at all deny the right of parliament to hold those ministers responsible, a right which, subservient as parliament was, it seemed little likely to wish to put in execution.

George III. had everything on his side but political intelligence. Whether Chatham were right in holding

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