Harold J. Laski

For the State is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment.

The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.

How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom.

The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation.

The populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons.

Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle.

Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled.

From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.

The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the preceding age.

The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's economic power.

The advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content.

But he met the new desires with hate instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic opinion underground.

Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional substance of the State.

The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for parliamentary government.

He announced the advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to work, than of the foundations upon which it is based.

But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of democratic England.

Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of the eighteenth century.

And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau.

When he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the Present Discontents and the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights are the dawn of a splendid recovery.

The people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles.

The sturdy morality of Johnson, the new literary forms of Richardson and Fielding, the theatre which Garrick founded upon the ruins produced by Collier's indignation, the revival of which Law and Wesley are the great symbols, show that the…

The constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance.

The theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation.

He turned political debate from principles to personalities, and a sterile generation was the outcome of his cunning.