n, that "no one was so
great as to be beyond the hatred of a minister, nor so little as to escape
the notice of a comptroller of excise." Every office in the state, from
the prime minister down to the humblest _employe_ in the post-office or
customs, was conferred to secure the fidelity of political supporters.
Liberality to opponents, the public good, fair dealing, the claims of long
service to the country, destitution, charity, noble descent, patriotic
conduct, were alike scouted, and by common consent banished from the
consideration of public men. Political support was the one thing needful;
and to secure it nothing was grudged, without it nothing was to be got.
Johnson's well-known definition of an exciseman, shows the profound
indignation which this universal and unsparing system of corruption
excited, among the few resolute and generous spirits which its long
continuance had left in the country. We heard nothing of the evils of this
system from the Whigs, during the seventy years subsequent to the
Revolution, when it was practised by themselves; but we have heard enough
of it from them since that time, when the state machine they had erected
has been worked by their opponents.

The Emperor Nicholas said to the Marquis Custine, with much bitterness and
some truth--"I can understand a democracy, where the popular voice is
every thing, and the magistrates implicitly obey its mandates. I can
understand a despotism, where the monarch's voice is every thing, and the
people merely obey his commands. But a constitutional monarchy, where the
people are mocked by a show of liberty which they do not possess, and
bribed into submission by corruption, by which they are really
degraded--that I do not understand, and I hope in God never again to see
it. I had enough of it in the government of Poland." Amidst all the
blessings of a limited and representative monarchy, which no one who
surveys the mighty empire of Great Britain can dispute, there is, it must
be confessed, some truth in this caustic remark. Walpole has told us of
the astonishing extent to which corruption was carried in his day, by Lord
Bute and the Tories, who got possession of the corrupting government in
1761, which the Whigs had been constructing since 1688. The untoward issue
of the war, which terminated in 1749 in the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, the
disgraceful commencement of the Seven Years' War, unjustly expiated by
the blood of Byng, gloriously redeemed by t