This profligacy Brown compares to the languid vice which preceded the
fall of Carthage and of Rome; and he sees the approaching ruin of Great
Britain at the hands of France, unless it can be cured. So far as he has
an explanation to offer, it seems to be the fault of Walpole, and the
decay of religious sentiment. His remedy is only Bolingbroke's Patriot
King, dressed up in the habit of the elder Pitt, now risen to the height
of power. What mainly stirred Englishmen was the prophecy of defeat on
the morrow of the disastrous convention of Kloster Seven; but when Wolfe
and Clive repaired that royal humiliation Brown seems to have died a
natural death. What is more interesting than his prophecies was the
evidence of a close reading of Montesquieu. English liberty, he says, is
the product of the climate; a kind of mixture, it appears, of fog and
sullen temper. Nations inevitably decay, and the commercial grandeur of
England is the symptom of old age; it means a final departure from the
simplicity of nature and breeds the luxury which kills by enervation.
Brown has no passion, and his book reads rather like Mr. Galsworthy's
_Island Pharisees_ sufficiently expurgated to be declaimed by a
well-bred clergyman in search of preferment on the ground of attention
to the evils of his time. It describes undoubted facts, and it shows
that the era of content has gone. But its careful periods and strangely
far-off air lack the eagerness for truth which Rousseau put into his
questions. Brown can neither explain nor can he proffer remedy. He sees
that Pitt is somehow significant; but when he rules out the popular
voice as devoid of all importance, he deprives himself of the means
whereby to grasp the meaning of the power that Pitt exerted. Nothing
could prove more strongly the exactitude of Burke's _Present
Discontents_. Nothing could better justify the savage indignation of
Junius.