gth worn
out that busy passion for intrigue, which power had not been able to
satiate, nor disgrace correct. He languished above a year longer, but
was heard of no more on the scene of affairs. (He died in November 1768.)

A remarkable circumstance in all those arrangements is, that we hear
nothing of either the king or the people. The king is of course
applied to to sign and seal, but simply as a head clerk. The people
are occasionally mentioned at the end of every seven years; but in the
interim all was settled in the parlours of the peerage! The scene
which we have just given was absolutely puerile, if it were not
scandalous; and, without laying ourselves open to the charge of
superstition on such subjects, we might almost regard the preservation
of the empire as directly miraculous, while power was in the hands of
such men as the Butes and Newcastles, the Bedfords and Rockinghams, of
the last century. It is not even difficult to trace to this
intolerable system, alike the foreign calamities and the internal
convulsions during this period. Whether America could, by any
possibility of arrangement, have continued a British colony up to the
present time, may be rationally doubted. A vast country, rapidly
increasing in wealth and population, would have been an incumbrance,
rather than an addition, to the power of England. If the patronage of
her offices continued in the hands of ministers, it must have supplied
them with the means of buying up every man who was to be bought in
England. It would have been the largest fund of corruption ever known
in the world. Or, if the connexion continued, with the population of
America doubling in every five-and-twenty years, the question must in
time have arisen, whether England or America ought to be the true seat
of government. The probable consequence, however, would have been
separation; and as this could scarcely be effected by amicable means,
the result might have been a war of a much more extensive, wasteful,
and formidable nature, than that which divided the two countries
sixty-five years ago.

But all the blunders of the American war, nay the war itself, may be
still almost directly traceable to the arrogance of the oligarchy. Too
much accustomed to regard government as a natural appendage to their
birth, they utterly forgot the true element of national power--the
force of public opinion. Inflated with a sense of their personal
superiority, they looked with easy indifferenc