n of
personality. His power lay in his style and the knowledge that enabled
him to inform the general public of facts which were the private
possession of the inner political circle. His mind was narrow and
pedantic. He stood with Grenville on American taxation; and he
maintained without perceiving what it meant that a nomination borough
was a freehold beyond the competence of the legislature to abolish. He
was never generous, always abusive, and truth did not enter into his
calculations. But he saw with unsurpassed clearness the nature of the
issue and he was a powerful instrument in the discomfiture of the king.
He won a new audience for political conflict and that audience was the
unenfranchised populace of England. His letters, moreover, appearing as
they did in the daily journals gave the press a significance in politics
which it has never lost. 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. The opposition was divided; the king's friends were in a
vast majority; the publication of debates was all but impossible.
English government was a secret conflict in which the entrance of
spectators was forbidden even though they were the subjects of debate.
It was the glory of Junius that he destroyed that system. 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.

II

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. His career is illustrative at once of the merits
and defects of English politics in the eighteenth century. The son of an
Irish Protestant lawyer and a Catholic mother, he served, after learning
what Trinity College, Dublin, could offer him, a long apprenticeship to
politics in the upper part of Grub Street. The story that he applied,
along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal;
though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (17