preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of
Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria
against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the
secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of
standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told
that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and
vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for
corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his
sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no
difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how
completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He
wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have
disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament.
The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous
insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.
Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with
the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the
settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire
for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open,
without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?

His value can be tested in another way. His _Idea of a Patriot King_ is
the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it
appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years,
so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature
experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the
strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and
the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative.
Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is
to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for