e or studied contempt on
every thing that was said or done by men whose genealogy was not
registered in the red book. Of America--a nation of Englishmen--and of
its proceedings, they talked, as a Russian lord might talk of his
serfs. Some of them thought, that a Stamp act would frighten the
sturdy free-holders of the Western World into submission! others
talked of reducing them to obedience by laying a tax on their tea!
others prescribed a regimen of writs and constables! evidently
regarding the American farmers as they regarded the poachers and
paupers on their own demesnes. All this arose from stupendous
ignorance; but it was ignorance engendered by pride, by exclusiveness
of rank, and by the arrogance of _caste_. So excessive was this
exclusiveness, that Burke, though the most extraordinary man of his
time, and one of the most memorable of any time, could never obtain a
seat in the cabinet; where such triflers as Newcastle, such figures of
patrician pedantry as Buckingham, such shallow intriguers as the
Bedfords, and such notorious characters as the Sandwiches, played with
power, like children with the cups and balls of their nursery. Lord
North, with all his wit, his industry, and his eloquence, owed his
admission into the cabinet, to his being the son of the Earl of
Guilford. Charles Fox, though marked by nature, from his first
entrance into public life, for the highest eminence of the senate,
would never have been received into the government _class_, but for
his casual connexion with the House of Richmond. Thus, they knew
nothing of the real powers of that infinite multitude, which, however
below the peerage, forms the country. They thought that a few frowns
from Downing Street could extinguish the resistance of millions, three
thousand miles off, with muskets in their hands, inflamed by a sense
of wrong, whether fancied or true, and insensible to the gatherings of
a brow however coroneted and antique.

This haughty exclusiveness equally accounts for the contests with
Wilkes. They felt themselves affronted, much more than resisted; they
were much more stung by the defiance of a private individual to
themselves, than they were urged to the collision by any conceivable
sense of hazard to the Monarchy. No man, out of bedlam, could
conceive, that Wilkes had either the power or the intention to subvert
the state. But Mr Wilkes, an obscure man, whose name was not known to
the calendar of the government fabricators, ha