Its place was but partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy.

Once the foundations of Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate controversy was absent.

The theory of a social contract never produced in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been secured there by other weapons.

Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler.

Not until the French Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling.

The eighteenth century has an importance in English politics which the comparative absence of systematic speculation can not conceal.

The process was very gradual; and the attempt of George III to arrest it produced the splendid effort of Edmund Burke.

Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics.

It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of representative government.

Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science.

The deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted to provide it in social terms.

It is, indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of thought.

The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism.

But the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent.

That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man.

For all of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained.

Its value is its denial of politics as a science distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations.

The eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find its place in the political equation.

There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good of the governing class with the general welfare of the state.

It became the fixed policy of Walpole to make prosperity the mask for political stagnation.

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

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

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 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…

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