had grasped the real essence of party government.

It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and
prime minister should have escaped his notice. A more serious defect was
his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to
see that the people had assumed a new importance. For the masses,
indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm. "A passive share," he thought, "was
the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted" to the
humble man. "The greater part," he wrote, "of those who compose this
multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence,
have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their
imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions
of this kind." Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the
American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications. He
trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that
institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III
could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its
own power. The real social forces of the time found there no channels of
activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the
latter's power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources
of power.



IV


The basis of revolutionary doctrine was already present in England when,
in 1762, Rousseau published his _Contrat Social_. With its fundamental
doctrines Locke had already made his countrymen familiar; and what was