CHAPTER VI

BURKE



I


It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the
king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the
dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory,
is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is
largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came
to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has
passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent
widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have
secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first
twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort
of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once
more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a
struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.

And George III attempted the realization of his ambition at a time
highly favorable to its success. Party government had lost much credit
during Walpole's administration. Men like Bolingbroke, Carteret and the
elder Pitt were all of them dissatisfied with a system which depended
for its existence upon the exclusion of able men from power. A