dier Townshend, who took all proper measures to complete the victory and to pursue the vanquished.

At the rear, to which he had been conveyed, Wolfe, meanwhile, lay expiring. From time to time he lifted his head to gaze on the field of battle, till he found his eyesight begin to fail. Then for some moments he lay motionless with no other sign of life than heavy breathing or a stifled groan. All at once an officer who stood by exclaimed, "See how they run!". "Who run?" cried Wolfe, eagerly raising himself on his elbow. "The enemy," answered the officer; "they give way in all directions."-"Then God be praised!" said Wolfe, after a short pause; "I shall die happy." These were his last words; he again fell back, and turning on his side, as if by a sharp convulsion, expired. He was but thirty-three years of age, when thus the Nelson of the army he died amidst the tidings of the victory he had achieved.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe. Edgar, The Struggle for a Continent. Kingsford, The History of Canada, Vol. IV. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Bradley, The Fight with France for North America.

PART VII

ENGLAND UNDER THE GEORGES

CHAPTER I

WALPOLE AND HIS SYSTEM

ON the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, the Tory party were completely discomfited by the Whigs. The former were excluded from office and branded as Jacobites. The new king was made to feel that he owed his throne to the Whigs who crowded around him and identified their political enemies with traitors. The character of the king and his foreign interests led him to rely more and more on the victorious party and leave the management of domestic politics in their hands. It was under these circumstances that Walpole became First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1721 and at the same time virtual master of the country through his support in Parliament, his influence with the king, his use of the appointments to government positions, and his corrupt practices. During his régime of nearly twenty years the foundations of party government and the cabinet system were so securely laid that later attempts to overthrow them failed. Though the life and work of Sir Robert Walpole have not been exhaustively treated by any modern writer, the student will find the brief biography by Mr. Morley, the statesman and brilliant man of letters, a suggestive and illuminating study, which gives a somewhat more favorable view of the practices of the former than is to be found in most other accounts.

§1. Walpole and Eighteenth-century Statesmen1

Is it true to say that Walpole was unscrupulous in his means for grasping power and keeping it? That he gave some advice without a blush which any leading English statesman to-day would readily rather extinguish his public life than give, is unfortunately too certain. Writers on morals tell us that conduct has an æsthetic and an ethical aspect; it is beautiful or ugly, as well as right or wrong. It is certain that, as some say, he had not the delicate sense of honor, which marks the ideal public man. But it cannot be disguised that many men have shown a want of a fine sense of honor, whom still we should hesitate to brand generally as either unscrupulous or unprincipled. Chatham acted in a way that was not at all to his honor, when he first offered to screen Walpole, and then on his offer being repulsed, redoubled the violence of his attack. George III did many shabby, cunning, and unscrupulous things, yet tradition is gradually coming to pass him off as a very honest gentleman. Did Mr. Pitt exhibit perfect delicacy of honor when, on coming back to power in 1804, he allowed the stubborn king to ostracize Mr. Fox? Yet Pitt is usually treated as the pink of moral elevation, and he did undoubtedly take a loftier view of the connection between public authority and private honor than had been the fashion before his time. The equity of history requires that we shall judge men of action by the standards of men of action. Nobody would single out highmindedness as one of Walpole's conspicuous attributes. It is not a very common attribute among active politicians in any age. On the other hand, Walpole was neither low-minded nor small-minded. His son had a right to boast that he never gave up the interests of his party to serve his own, though he often gave up his own opinions to please friends who were serving themselves. With the firmest confidence in himself, he was neither pragmatical nor arrogant. He was wholly free from spite and from envy; he bore no malice, though when he had once found a man out in playing tricks, he took care never to forget it; and he was right, for the issues at stake were too important to allow him to forget.

2. The Exclusion of Able Colleagues

It is said that he could not brook a colleague of superior ability, and that he took care to surround himself with mediocrities like

Morley, Walpole, pp. 116 ff. By permission of Rt. Hon. John Morley and The Macmillan Company, Publishers.

the Duke of Newcastle. We may test the accusation by the conduct of Chatham. Nobody has ever taunted him with this ignoble jealousy, yet he acted precisely as Walpole acted. After fighting against Newcastle as long as he could, he gave way to him just as Walpole had found it expedient to do. "I borrowed the Duke of Newcastle's majority," said Pitt in 1757, "to carry on the public business." It was his majority, not his mediocrity, that Walpole valued. So with the proscriptions. Pitt peremptorily excluded Henry Fox from his famous administration, though Fox was the ablest debater in Parliament; and he declined to advance Charles Townshend, who was more near to being his intellectual equal than anybody else then in the House of Commons. Neither in Pitt's case nor in Walpole's case is it necessary to ascribe their action to anything worse than the highly judicious conviction that whether in carrying out a great policy of peace like Walpole's, or an arduous policy of war like Pitt's, the very worst impediment that a minister can have is a colleague in his cabinet who spoils superior ability by perversities of restlessness and egotism. There is not one of the able men ostracized, as it is called, by Walpole whose political steadiness and personal fidelity he could safely trust; and not one of them, let us not forget to add, who, for fifteen years after his fall, ever showed himself any better able to work with other colleagues and leaders than he had been to work with Walpole.

83. Walpole not an Intriguer

Walpole took the pleasures, the honors, the prizes of the world as they came in his way, and he thoroughly relished and enjoyed them; but what his heart was seriously set upon all the timeseriously, persistently, strenuously, devotedly was the promotion of good government and the frustration and confusion of its enemies. When men got in his way, he thrust them aside, without misgiving or remorse, just as a commander in the field would remove a meddling, wrong-headed, or incompetent general of division without remorse. But to be remorseless is a very different thing from being unscrupulous. I am not aware of a single proof that Walpole ever began those intrigues against his enemies which they were always so ready to practise against him. It was Stanhope and Sunderland, not Walpole, who began and carried out the intrigues that ended in the schism of 1717. It was Carteret who caballed with the Tory leaders against his own colleagues

after Sunderland's death. It was Bolingbroke and the Duchess of Kendal who strove by underhand arts to procure access for the former to George I, and when Walpole found out what was going on, he at once boldly urged the king to grant Bolingbroke his audience, and to hear all that he had to say. It was Chesterfield who tried to set up a clique against Walpole within his own ministry. Much is made of the case of Townshend. But it is rather a paradox to prove Walpole's imperious refusal to share power with able colleagues by referring us to Townshend, with whom he worked in unbroken cordiality for the best part of thirty years and with whom he did loyally share power, himself in a relation rather subordinate than otherwise, for three of these years. It was Townshend, moreover, who at the last took advantage of his journey with the king to Hanover secretly to ingratiate himself in the royal favor to the disadvantage of Walpole at home. Plenty of intriguing was carried on, but not by Walpole. A candid and particular examination of the political history of that time, so far as the circumstances are known to us, leads to the conclusion that of all his contemporaries, from men of genius like Bolingbroke and Carteret, from able and brilliant men like Townshend and Chesterfield, Wyndham, and Pulteney, down to a mediocre personage like the Duke of Newcastle, Walpole was the least unscrupulous of the men of that time, the most straightforward, bold, and open, and the least addicted to scheming and cabal. He relied more than they did, not less, upon what after all in every age is the only solid foundation of political power, though it may not always lead to the longest term of office upon his own superior capacity, more constant principle, firmer will, and clearer vision.

84. The Charge of Parliamentary Corruption

That Walpole practised what would now be regarded as Parliamentary corruption is undeniable. But political conduct must be judged in the light of political history. Not very many years before Walpole a man was expected to pay some thousands of pounds for being made Secretary of State, just as down to our own time he paid for being made colonel of a regiment. Many years after Walpole, Lord North used to job the loans, and it was not until the younger Pitt set a loftier example that any minister saw the least harm in keeping a portion of a public loan in his own hands for distribution among his private friends. For the minister to buy the vote of a member of Parliament was not then thought much