antagonism.  It is too obviously the programme of a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system.  The minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy—­all these have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy.  Attacks on corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of finance in politics.  For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish ingenuity.  The return of landed men to power would mean the return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a regime which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power.  The pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick’s son; and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the circumstances permitted.  It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L.  Smith has argued, unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George’s version of his ideal; yet they are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other.  Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party; and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king.  But Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli’s genial declamation and his practice when in office.  It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.

II

The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought; the system continued, though the men were different.  What alone can be detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king.  An able pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent. Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts (1742) was, though it is anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current of affairs.  The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees the chaos in its result.  “A republican spirit,” he says, “has strangely arisen”; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom instructions might