ascribed to selfish faction; and in his _Taxation no Tyranny_ (1775) he
defended the British government root and branch upon his favorite ground
of the necessity of subordination. He was willing, he said, to love all
mankind except an American.

Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an
acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and
fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the
letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He
knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe
under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as
one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish
as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the
sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt
for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular.
There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of
the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time
was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as
elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental
questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age
are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is
diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require
something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude
would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but
where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to
contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in
a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to
look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution.