but a perpetual revolution, in the shape of official changes, the hourly rise and fall of public men, the violent professions of this day contrasted with the violent abjurations of the next, the lofty pledges followed by the abject compliances, the claims of the reigning Ministers to confidence mingled with the complaints of the fallen Ministers of treachery, rapidly turned the people into judges of all public men, erected a tribunal of state offences in every street, and summoning the multitude to a jurisdiction to which their reason was incompetent, left Government at the mercy of their prejudices. The general result was, to degrade all public servants in the national eye; but the immediate was, to shake the supremacy of the great families in the government of the country. Chatham himself had been an intruder on the proud aristocracy of the Cabinet. But wherever his banner waved, victory must have sat upon it; his extraordinary powers were not made to be repulsed by their frigid forms. He could not enter by the gate, but he boldly scaled the walls, and made himself master of the citadel. The King, whom he could not conciliate, he kept in awe; and the Ministry, whom he could not coerce, he held in obedience by the popular voice, which followed all his enterprises. But in his fall he completely drew down with him the veil which had hitherto covered the ministerial weakness of the great families. They struggled long to regain their ancient right to dispose of the Cabinet; but the struggle constantly became more unsuccessful; until the still greater son of that great man who had first broke in upon their privilege of possession, finished the contest, by throwing open government to men of all ranks, and making public ability the ground of official distinction.

political virtue only to the rolls of the Heralds' College; nothing more just, natural, or congenial to the improving intelligence of the empire, than that some of that vast harvest of ability and knowledge, which was hourly growing up with the growing influence of the middle orders, should be gathered for the public use; that the hourly opening mine of public genius should be worked for the benefit of the high concerns of empire.

All would have been fortunate if the operation could have stopped here. But the almost immediate result of abolishing this patent of the great families, was to create a new and singularly hazardous influence in the State. The high aristocrats, stiff with the privileges of generations, suddenly assumed the flexibility of popular canvass. The populace in their turn hailed their new allies, and rejoiced in their familiarity with the Peerage. The extremes of society met. The old Court suit, with all its royal embroidery, was thrown off for the costume of the club and the coffeehouse; the contest for power was adjourned from the Cabinet to the streets; and the men who would have frowned down, with hereditary haughtiness, the slightest approach of the order immediately below themselves, however graced by learning and genius, sprang down at once to the lowest grade, and bound themselves to the populace by a bond which will never be dissolved, but in their own ruin. On this overthrow of the ancient patentees of power, Burke was led to write his famous pamphlet, entitled "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents." The public clamours which assailed Lord North's Ministry, had grown at this period (1770) to a height which threatened dangerous tumult. Burke, the friend and follower of Lord Rockingham, and involved in his exclusion, naturally imputed a large share of the clamour to the loss of his ministerial councils. But it is the characteristic and the value of his writings, that the particular topic always expands into the general instruction, and that even out of the barrenness of an eulogy on Lord Rockingham, he could raise maxims for the wisdom of mankind. He thus describes the

Yet no maxim is more unquestionable, than that all change in the old principles of a country is hazardous. Nothing could seem more pregnant with good than the dismissal of antiquated feebleness for young vigour; nothing more suited to infuse a new wisdom in the national councils than the extinction of those obsolete prejudices, which found their protection only in wealth, and referred for

origin of the aristocratic caste in statesmanship:

"At the Revolution, the Crown, deprived, for the ends of the Revolution itself, of many prerogatives, was found too weak to struggle against all the difficulties which pressed on so new and unsettled a Government. The Court was obliged to delegate a part of its powers to men of such interest as could support, and of such fidelity as would adhere to, its establishment. This connexion, necessary at first, continued long after convenient, and, properly conducted, might indeed, in all situations, be an useful instrument of Government. At the same time, through the intervention of men of popular weight and character, the people possessed a security for their just proportion of importance in the State."

Having accounted for the rise of the aristocracy to power, he accounts for their fall. In this statement, his pencil is dipt in Rockingham colours: but those colours were pure, and the outline is admirably true. He tells us, that when the Court felt itself beginning to grow strong, it began also to feel the irksomeness of dependence on its Ministers, and resolved to deal with more complying Cabinets. "The greatest weight of popular opinion and party connexion was then with the Duke of Newcastle and Mr Pitt. Neither of these held his importance by the new tenure of the Court; they were not, therefore, thought to be so proper as others for the services which were required by that tenure. It happened, very favourably for the new system, that under a forced coalition there rankled an incurable alienation and disgust between the parties which composed the administration. Mr Pitt was first attacked. Not satisfied with removing him from power, they endeavoured by various artifices to ruin his character. The other party seemed rather pleased to get rid of so oppressive a support, not perceiving that their own fall was prepared by his, and involved in it. Many other reasons prevented them from daring to look their true situation in the face. * * * * The

power of Mr Pitt was vast and merited, but it was in a great degree personal, and therefore transient.

The power of the great aristocratic families was rooted in the country. With a good deal less of popularity, they possessed a far more natural and fixed influence. Long possession of government, vast property, obligations of favours given and received, connexion of office, ties of blood, of alliance, of friendship, the name of Whig, dear to the majority of the people, the zeal, early begun and steadily continued, to the royal family, all these together formed a body of power in the nation."

Inconsistency is the favourite topic of the libellers of Burke. But the language which he held in this pamphlet is the language which he breathed from his expiring tongue; sacred honour for established institutions, hatred of worthless change, just respect for the natural influence of rank, birth, and property. The change was not in the writer, but in the men. The French Revolution was the boundary-line between the aristocrat of his first day and his last, the gulf which whoever passed left his former robes on the edge, and came out naked. He as powerfully asserts the superior claim of the first class of the nation to govern the State in 1770, as he asserted it in the full fury and tempest of 1793.

"One of the principal topics," he observes," of the new school, is a terror of the growth of an aristocratic power, prejudicial to the rights of the Crown, and the balance of the Constitution. It is true, that the Peers have a great influence in the kingdom, and in every part of the public concerns. While they are men of property, it is impossible to prevent it, except by such means as must prevent all property from its natural operation, an event not easily to be compassed, while property is power; nor by any means to be wished, while the least notion exists of the method by which the spirit of liberty acts, and of the means by which it is preserved. If any particular Peers, by their uniform, upright, constitutional conduct, by their public and their private virtues, have acquired an influence in the country, the people, on whose favour that influence depends, will never be duped into an opinion, that such greatness in a Peer is the despotism of an aristocracy, when they know

and feel it to be the pledge of their own importance.

"I am no friend to aristocracy, in the sense, at least, in which that word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit to moot cases on the supposed ruin of the Constitution, I should be free to declare, that, if it must perish, I should rather, by far, see it resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere and insolent domination. But whatever my dislikes are, my fears are not from that quarter."

It is clear, that in this passage, the writer alludes to an aristocracy assuming the sole functions of Government, not an English, buta Venetian aristocracy, an oligarchy at once shielding itself from responsibility by its numbers, and overawing the people by its dark and sullen violence. The power to which he alludes as the object of dread, is that of a faction behind the throne. It is equally clear, that even Burke's wisdom mistook the true hazard of the Constitution, that in contemplating the power of an intriguing Court, he overlooked the tyranny of an irresponsible populace; that in guarding the Constitutional tree from the southern, sickly breezes of Court patronage, he forgot the hurricane that would shatter and root it out of the ground. But even his sagacity may be forgiven for being unable to anticipate the horrors of revolutionary rage. It is to the honour of his humanity that he was yet to learn the depths of the popular heart, when convulsed and laid open by the sense of uncontrollable power; the terrible deposits of the revolutionary volcano, when once shaken and kindled into flame.

rity and national subordination; and no more dreaming of an appeal to the multitude for the support of their measures, than they would have dreamt of allying them with their blood; a genuine English aristocracy, doubtless bearing somewhat of the disqualifications produced by time upon all things human, perhaps too proud to be easily accessible to the public feelings, too fully satisfied with their ancient possession of prosperity to think, that while all went well with the Peerage, the nation could suffer any serious evil; and too fond of the silk and ermine of their state to be prepared to cast them off, and grapple with those new public difficulties which new times were bringing on, and which demanded the whole unembarrassed muscle and activity of the man. Still, in that class, there was a great safeguard for the Crown and the people; a nobleness more of mind than even of rank; an embodying of grave manliness, and generous and pure principle, derived from an early superiority to the motives and habits which the common exigencies of things sometimes impose on men struggling through the obscurer ways of life; a patrician dignity, which spread from the manners to the mind, and if it did not give full security against the assumption of a power beyond their right, yet prevented all the meaner abuses of the functions of government, all personal and petty tyranny, all the baser tamperings with popular corruption, and all the ignoble jealousy, livid rancour, and bloodthirsty persecution of power suddenly consigned to the hands of the multitude.

It is also to be remembered, that during this entire discussion, the question is not of Whigs or Tories, according to their later qualities. In Burke's early day, the Whigs were but another name for the landed interest, for the great body of family and fortune of the country; the habitual Ministers of the Crown, and claiming to be all but the hereditary governors of the empire; but little connected with any inferior class of the State, and scarcely recognising the existence of the populace; holding the highest doctrines on the subject of allegiance, priestly autho

In adverting to the remedies proposed for the renovation of the State, he touches upon the two grand expedients, which are now received with such cheers, Triennial Parliaments, and the exclusion of every man holding office, from Parliament. His language on those heating topics, shews how maturely he had formed his earliest political impressions.

If I wrote merely to please the popular palate, it would indeed be as little troublesome to me as to another, to extol those remedies so famous in speculation; but to which their greatest admirers have never