_Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_ (1721) shows rather
the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea
Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought.
Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with
seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the
estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite
the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole
governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the
keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a
superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men
low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the
man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions
to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over
the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from
office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney,
Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in
office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically
conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief
that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration.
The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity
upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a
doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it
was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until
1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter
year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in
high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had
evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the
intellectual bankruptcy of the time.

To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember