Nor must we belittle what insight De Lolme possessed.  He saw that the early concentration of power in the royal hands prevented the continental type of feudalism from developing in England; with the result that while French nobles were massacring each other, the English people could unite to wrest privileges from the superior power.  He understood that one of the mainsprings of the system was the independence of the judges.  He realized that the party-system—­he never used the actual term—­while it provides room for men’s ambitions at the same time prevents the equation of ambition with indispensability.  “Woe to him,” says De Lolme, “... who should endeavor to make the people believe that their fate depends on the persevering virtue of a single citizen.”  He sees the paramount value of freedom of the press.  This, as he says, with the necessity that members should be re-elected, “has delivered into the hands of the people at large the exercise of the censorial power.”  He has no doubt but that resistance is the remedy whereby governmental encroachment can be prevented; “resistance,” he says, “is the ultimate and lawful resource against the violences of power.”  He points out how real is the guarantee of liberty where the onus of proof in criminal cases is thrown upon the government.  He regards with admiration the supremacy of the civil over the military arm, and the skillful way in which, contrary to French experience, it has been found possible to maintain a standing army without adding to the royal power.  Nor can he fail to admire the insight which organizes “the agitation of the popular mind,” not as “the forerunner of violent commotions” but to “animate all parts of the state.”  Therein De Lolme had grasped the real essence of party government.

It was, of course, no more than symptomatic of his time that cabinet and prime minister should have escaped his notice.  A more serious defect was his inability, with the Wilkes contest prominently in his notice, to see that the people had assumed a new importance.  For the masses, indeed, De Lolme had no enthusiasm.  “A passive share,” he thought, “was the only one that could, with safety to the state, be trusted” to the humble man.  “The greater part,” he wrote, “of those who compose this multitude, taken up with the care of providing for their subsistence, have neither sufficient leisure, nor even, in consequence of their imperfect education, the degree of information, requisite for functions of this kind.”  Such an attitude blinded him to the significance of the American conflict, which he saw unattended by its moral implications.  He trusted too emphatically to the power of mechanisms to realize that institutions which allowed of such manipulation as that of George III could not be satisfactory once the people had awakened to a sense of its own power.  The real social forces of the time found there no channels of activity; and the difference between De Lolme and Bagehot is the latter’s power to go behind the screen of statute to the inner sources of power.