historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers
in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different
substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and
Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like
Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.

Yet urbanity must not deceive us. The eighteenth century has an
importance in English politics which the comparative absence of
systematic speculation can not conceal. If its large constitutional
outlines had been traced by a preceding age, its administrative detail
had still to be secured. The process was very gradual; and the attempt
of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.
Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it
gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.
It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and
therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called
the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the
sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith
gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite
its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church
and State as that to which Hoadly's bishopric contributed its name. De
Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in
Bagehot's hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.
Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor
Dicey. The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved
the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.
The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat
beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume. Yet it was a great work