Even when the last criticism has been made, detraction from these estimates is impossible.  It is easy to show how irritable and violent was his temperament.  There is evidence and to spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment.  His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies.  As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles.  Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared his means with Barry and with Crabbe.  His alliance with Fox is the classic partnership in English politics, unmarried, even enriched, by the tragedy of its close.  He was never guilty of mean ambition.  He thought of nothing save the public welfare.  No man has ever more consistently devoted his energies to the service of the nation with less regard for personal advancement.  No English statesman has ever more firmly moved amid a mass of details to the principle they involve.

He was a member of no school of thought, and there is no influence to whom his outlook can be directly traced.  His politics, indeed, bear upon their face the preoccupation with the immediate problems of the House of Commons.  Yet through them all the principles that emerge form a consistent whole.  Nor is this all.  He hated oppression with all the passion of a generous moral nature.  He cared for the good as he saw it with a steadfastness which Bright and Cobden only can claim to challenge.  What he had to say he said in sentences which form the maxims of administrative wisdom.  His horizon reached from London out to India and America; and he cared as deeply for the Indian ryot’s wrongs as for the iniquities of English policy to Ireland.  With less width of mind than Hume and less intensity of gaze than Adam Smith, he yet had a width and intensity which, fused with his own imaginative sympathy, gave him more insight than either.  He had an unerring eye for the eternal principles of politics.  He knew that ideals must be harnessed to an Act of Parliament if they are not to cease their influence.  Admitting while he did that politics must rest upon expediency, he never failed to find good reason why expediency should be identified with what he saw as right.  It is a stainless and a splendid record.  There are men in English politics to whom a greater immediate influence may be ascribed, just as in political philosophy he cannot claim the persistent inspiration of Hobbes and Locke.  But in that middle ground between the facts and speculation his supremacy is unapproached.  There had been nothing like him before in English politics; and in continental politics Royer Collard alone has something of his moral fibre, though his practical insight was far less profound.  Hamilton had Burke’s full grasp of political wisdom, but he lacked his moral elevation.  So that he remains a figure of uniqueness.  He may, as Goldsmith said, have expended upon his party talents that should have illuminated the universal aspect of the State.  Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his enquiry.