Harold J. Laski

So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained.

We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity.

The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted.

The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters.

His Idea of a Patriot King is the remedy for the ills he has depicted.

He is to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities of a bad king.

He will not stand upon party, but upon the State.

His conduct must be dignified, and he must acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection of his people.

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.

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…

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…

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.

Yet nowhere was so clearly to be demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.

There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right and the social contract.

Government, in short, is dependent upon the inescapable facts of psychology.

It might be unnecessary if all desires could be individually fulfilled by making them, or if man showed to his fellow-men the same tender regard he has for himself.

So happy a condition does not exist; and government is the most useful way of remedying the defects of our situation.

His whole attitude is simply an insistence that utility is the touchstone of institutions, and he may claim to be the first thinker who attempted its application to the whole field of political science.

He knows that opinion is the sovereign ruler of mankind, and that ideas of utility lie at the base of the thoughts which get accepted.

He does not, indeed, deny that fear and consent enter into the attitude of men; he simply asserts that these also are founded upon a judgment of utility in the thing judged.

He sees that the subjection of the many to the few is rooted in human impulse; but he has no penetrating inquiry, such as that of Locke or Hobbes, into the purpose of such subjection.

So, too, it is the sense of public interest which determines men's thoughts on government, on who should rule, and what should be the system of property; but the ethical substance of these questions he leaves undetermined.

Yet Hume is full of flashes of deep wisdom, and it would be an avoidance of justice not to note the extent of the spasmodic insight that he had.

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