people.  America made herself independent while what was best in Europe combined in enthusiastic applause; and it seemed as though the maxims of Rousseau had been taken to heart and that a single, vigorous exertion of power could remove what deliberation was impotent to secure.  Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied.  Nor, at the moment, was it influential except in the general impetus it gave to thought.  But from the moment of its appearance it is an undercurrent of decisive importance; and while in its metaphysical form it failed to command acceptance, in the hands of Bentham its results were victorious.  Bentham differs from Rousseau not in the conclusions he recommends so much as in the language in which he clothes them.  Either make a final end of the optimism of men like Hume and Blackstone, or the veneration for the past which is at the root of Burke’s own teaching.

It is easy to see why thought such as this should have given the stimulus it did.  Montesquieu came to praise the British constitution at a time when good men were aghast at its perversion.  There was no room in many years for revolution, but at least there was place for hearty discontent and a seeking after new methods.  Of that temper two men so different as the elder Pitt and Wilkes are the political symbols.  The former’s rise to power upon the floodtide of popular enthusiasm meant nothing so much as a protest against the cynical corruption of the previous generation.  Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power.  The French creed was too purely logical, too obviously the outcome of alien conditions, to fit in its entirety the English facts; and, it must be admitted, memories of wooden shoes played not a little part in its rejection.  The rights of man made only a partial appeal until the miseries of Pitt’s wars showed what was involved in that rejection; and then it was too late.  But no one could feel without being stirred the illumination of Montesquieu; and Rousseau’s questions, even if they proved unanswerable, were stuff for thought.  The work of the forty years before the French Revolution is nothing so much as a preparation for Bentham.  The torpor slowly passes.  The theorists build an edifice each part of which a man whose passion is attuned to the English nature can show to be obsolete and ugly.  If the French thinkers had conferred no other benefit, that, at least, would have been a supreme achievement.

II

The first book to show the signs of change came in 1757.  John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times is largely forgotten now; though it went through seven editions in a year and was at once translated into French.  Brown was a clergyman, a minor planet in the vast Warburtonian system, who had already published a volume of comment upon the Characteristics of Shaftesbury.