The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George's effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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The basis of government should be widened, for every honest man was aware that distinctions of party were now merely nominal.
He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the unenfranchised populace of England.
He made the significance of George's effort known to the mass of men at a time when no other means of information was at hand.
Not even the combined influence of the Crown and Commons, not even Lord Mansfield's doctrine of the law of libel, could break the power of his vituperation and Wilkes' courage.
Bad men have sometimes been the instruments of noble destiny; and there are few more curious episodes in English history than the result of this alliance between revengeful hate and insolent ambition.
Yet, in the long run, the real weapon which defeated George was the ideas of Edmund Burke; for he gave to the political conflict its real place in philosophy.
There is no immortality save in ideas; and it was Burke who gave a permanent form to the debate in which he was the liberal protagonist.
Yet when Fox is little more than a memory of great lovableness and Pitt a marvellous youth of apt quotations, Burke has endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.
For it has been the singular good fortune of Burke not merely to obtain acceptance as the apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort to men of liberal temper.
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 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.
Yet there is no question with which he dealt that he did not leave the richer for his enquiry.
Where constitutional reform was in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid conservatism.
But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise.
What moved him was the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom.
He never concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the maintenance of English liberties.
He saw that here, as in America, no man will be argued into slavery.
A government which defied the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster.
Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan?
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
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