said Lord Weymouth, in his famous letter to the Surrey magistrates, "can never be employed to a more constitutional purpose than in the support of the authority and dignity of the magistracy." If the magistrate should be menaced, "he is cautioned not to delay a moment in calling for the aid of the military, and making use of them effectually." Such an occasion "always presents itself when the civil power is trifled with and insulted." The consequence of this bloody scroll, as Wilkes rightly called it, was that shortly afterwards an affray occurred between the crowd and the troops, in which some twenty people were killed and wounded (May 10, 1768). Instead of keeping the military in the background until absolutely wanted, the magistrates, along with the soldiers, at once came upon the ground. The following day, the Secretary of War, Lord Barrington, wrote to the commanding officer, informing him that "his Majesty highly approves of the conduct both of officers and men, and means that his gracious approbation of them should be communicated to them by you." "I beg you will be pleased to. assure them that every possible regard shall be shown to them. Their zeal and good behaviour on this occasion deserve it; and in case any disagreeable circumstance should happen in the execution of their duty, they

shall have every defence and protection that the law can authorise and that this office can give." This gracious approval of bloodshed, and encouraging invitation to shed more blood whenever an opportunity should offer, needs no comment. It is worth remembering as a set-off, when one hears people talking nonsense about King George's honesty and sincerity, just as if sincerity were any palliative in a ruler for folly, incompetence, and a savage's indifference to human life.1 Various other steps were taken to show that Lord Barrington had promised not a word more than he meant to perform. Burke brought the matter before the House in a motion for a Committee of Inquiry, supported by one of the most lucid and able of his minor speeches. ever the time should come," he concluded, "when this House shall be found prompt to execute and slow to inquire; ready to punish the excesses of the people, and slow to listen to their grievances; ready to grant supplies, and slow to examine the account; ready to

"If

1 The complacency with which he contemplated the time "when decrepitude or death should put an end to" Lord Chatham, is familiar. (Corr. with Lord North, i. 261). Yet, "I am not conscious of having much gall in my composition" (i. 71). There is a ghastly kind of quaintness in the ease with which he looks out for windfalls in the way of patronage, and expresses his conviction first that one and then another cannot "last long."

invest magistrates with large powers, and slow to inquire into the exercise of them; ready to entertain notions of the military power as incorporated with the constitution,-when you learn this in the air of St. James's, then the business is done; then the House of Commons will change that character which it receives from the people only." Of course his motion for a committee was lost by an enormous and overwhelming majority.1

Another transaction which befell in the same Parliament may be cited to show the evil courses on which the majority in the House were firmly set. In 1769 the minister came down with the information that his Majesty had got rather more than half a million into debt, and that he relied on "the known zeal and affection of his faithful Commons, that they would make provision for enabling his Majesty to discharge the same." Manifestly nobody was likely to oppose the making of such a provision. Not even the democratic aldermen, Beckford and Trecothick, who opened the discussion upon the message, hinted that they would like the court tradesmen to become bankrupt, or the foreign ministers to go unpaid, through the scandalous insolvency of the monarch. But, on the other hand, 1245 against 30. Cavendish Debates, i. 307–337.

no legislator with the dimmest conception of duty to the nation would have dreamt of instantly complying with the demands of the royal bankrupt, before the production and examination of the accounts. Duty to the nation, however, was not a generally esteemed sentiment. The accounts were not allowed to be produced. "Let us relieve the Crown," Lord North cried, "as we ought, wisely, frankly, cheerfully, dutifully." Dutifulness to the Crown overruled all meaner motives, and half a million of the public money went in channels that were never disclosed to the public eye. Taxpayers might have been pardoned if they had failed to see any difference between their own position and that of their ancestors who had been made blindly to pay Ship-money and Benevolences, except the unimportant point that the House of Commons was now the facile instrument through which the sovereign reached them. The extortion was more decorously managed in the days of George III. than in those of Charles I., but the principle, that the public should pay money for royal purposes which they had no chance of scrutinising or controlling, was identical. The great and ever - memorable illustration and overthrow of this principle was still to come.1

1 The debates on the Civil List Arrears, in Cavendish (i. 268-306),

are

It is a relief to turn from the contemplation of these narrow, selfish, and slavish ideas, to those other loftier, wider, and more enduring views of the function of the Lower House in Government, of which Burke was the wise and passionate champion. He at least never yielded to "that indifference to the constitution which had been for some time growing among our gentry." 1 He was not absolutely insensible to the fatal splendour of the theory of a patriot king. "A system unfavourable to freedom may be so formed as considerably to exalt the grandeur of the State; and men may find in the pride and splendour of that prosperity some sort

See also Present Discontents,

are very full and very interesting. Works, i. 145. In 1769 a debt of £513,000 was paid for the Civil List; in 1777 a debt of £618,340 (besides the addition of another hundred thousand a year to the Civil List); in 1786, a debt of £210,000; and so on until the end of the reign, when it was found that "the several arrears paid off by Parliament, exclusive of the debt of £300,000 charged on the Civil List in 1782, amounted to £3,398,000." (May's Const. History, i. 206.) The nation, however, was only too proud to pay handsomely in this and a good many other ways, for the majestic and heroic virtues of a ruler who would dine, as Addington testifies, on chops and a dumpling, and who abstained from debauching the maids of honour. A careful comparison of the financial atrocities of this reign with the thrift of such a man as Frederick the Great is painfully instructive. But England, as Mr. Carlyle says, was the inventor of "that sublime art of rolling over on you know not whom the expenditure, needful or needless, of your heavy-laden self.” 1 Present Discontents, Works, i. 133, b.