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was the life depicted on the canvas of Hogarth and the pages of Fielding. All high imagination, all devotion to the public weal, seemed laid asleep. But the political instinct was not dead, and it would one day express itself for better ends than an agitation against an excise bill or an outcry for a popular war. A government could no longer employ its powers for direct oppression. In his own house and in his own conscience, every Englishman, as far as the government was concerned, was the master of his destiny. By and by the idea would dawn on the nation that anarchy is as productive of evil as tyranny, and that a government which omits to regulate or control allows the strong to oppress the weak, and the rich to oppress the poor. Walpole's administration lasted long enough to give room for some feeble expression of this feeling. When George I. was succeeded by George II. (1727), Walpole remained in power.

His eagerness for the possession of that power which he desired to use for his country's good, together with the incapacity of two kings born and bred in a foreign country to take a leading part in English affairs, completed the change which had been effected when William first entrusted the conduct of government to a united cabinet. There was now for the first time a prime minister in England, a person who was himself a subject imposing harmonious action on the cabinet. The change was so gradually and silently effected that it is difficult to realize its full importance. So far, indeed, as it only came about through the incapacity of the first two kings of the house of Hanover, it might be undone, and was in fact to a great extent undone by a more active successor. But so far as it was the result of general tendencies, it could never be obliterated. In the ministries in which Somers and Montagu on the one hand and Harley and St John on the other had taken part, there was no prime minister except so far as one member of the administration dominated over his colleagues by the force of character and intelligence.

In the reign of George III., even North and Addington were universally acknowledged by that title, though they had little claim to the independence of action of a Walpole or a Pitt. The change was, in fact, one of the most important of those by which the English constitution has been altered from an hereditary monarchy with a parliamentary regulative agency to a parliamentary government with an hereditary regulative agency. In Walpole's time the forms of the constitution had become, in all essential particulars, what they are now. What was wanting was a national force behind them to set them to their proper work. The growing opposition which finally drove Walpole from power was not entirely without a nobler element than could be furnished by personal rivalry, or ignorant distrust of commercial and financial success. It was well that complaints that a great country ought not to be governed by patronage and bribery should be raised, although, as subsequent experience showed, the causes which rendered corruption inevitable were not to be removed by the expulsion of Walpole from office. But for one error, indeed, it is probable that Walpole's rule would have been still further prolonged.

In 1739 a popular excitement arose for a declaration of war against Spain. Walpole believed that war to be certainly unjust, and likely to be disastrous. He had, however, been so accustomed to give way to popular pressure that he did not perceive the difference between a wise and timely determination to leave a right action undone in the face of insuperable difficulties, and an unwise and cowardly determination to do that which he believed to be wrong and imprudent. If he had now resigned rather than demean himself by acting against his conscience, it is by no means unlikely that he would have been recalled to power before many years were over. As it was, the failures of the war recoiled on his own head, and in 1742 his long ministry came to an end. After a short interval a successor was found in Henry Pelham. All the ordinary arts of corruption which Walpole had practised were continued, and to them were added arts of corruption