ere
made, were "so bred and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it."
But the line between what the King called corruption and that which he
and all his ministers practiced openly and habitually, as part of the
regular work of government, is dim and hard to define. The mind of the
community had not yet firmly grasped the conception of public office as
a trust for the public good, and the general opinion which stimulates
and sustains the official conscience in holding this trust sacred was
still unformed. The courts of justice were the first branch of the
government to feel the pressure of public opinion, and to respond to
the demand for impersonal and impartial right. But this process had only
begun when Bacon, who had never before served as judge, was called to
preside in Chancery. The Chancellor's office was a gradual development:
originally political and administrative rather than judicial, and with
no salary or reward for hearing causes, save the voluntary presents of
suitors who asked its interference with the ordinary courts, it step by
step became the highest tribunal of the equity which limits and corrects
the routine of law, and still the custom of gifts was unchecked. A
careful study of Bacon's career shows that in this, as every other
branch of thought, his theoretic convictions were in advance of his age;
and in his advice to the King and in his inaugural promises as
Chancellor, he foreshadows all the principles on which the wisest
reformers of the public service now insist. But he failed to apply them
with that heroic self-sacrifice which alone would have availed him, and
the forces of custom and example continually encroached upon his views
of duty. Having through a long life sought advancement and wealth for
the purpose of using leisure and independence to carry out his
beneficent plans on the largest scale, he eagerly accepted the
traditional emoluments of his new position, in the conviction that they
would become in his hands the means of vast good to mankind. It was only
the public exposure which fully awakened him to a sense of the
inconsistency and wrong of his conduct; and then he was himself his
severest judge, and made every reparation in his power, by the most
unreserved confession, by pointing out the danger to society of such
weakness as his own in language to whose effectiveness nothing could be
added, and by devoting the remainder of his life to the noblest work
for humanity.

During