d actually dared to call
their privilege of power into question; had defied them in the courts
of law; had rebuked them in the senate; had shaken their influence in
the elections; and had, in fact, compelled them to know, what they
were so reluctant to learn, that they were but human beings after all!
The acquisition of this knowledge cost them half a dozen years of
convulsions, the most ruinous to themselves, and the most hazardous to
the constitution. Wilkes' profligacy alone, perhaps, saved the
constitution from a shock, which might have changed the whole system
of the empire. If he had not been sunk by his personal character, at
the first moment when the populace grew cool, he might have availed
himself of the temper of the times to commit mischiefs the most
irreparable. If his personal character had been as free from public
offence as his spirit was daring, he might have led the people much
further than the government ever had the foresight to contemplate. The
conduct of the successive cabinets had covered the King with
unpopularity, not the less fierce, that it was wholly undeserved.
Junius, the ablest political writer that England has ever seen, or
probably ever will see, in the art of assailing a ministry, had
pilloried every leading man of his time except Chatham, in the
imperishable virulence of his page. The popular mind was furious with
indignation at the conduct of all cabinets; in despair of all
improvement in the system; irritated by the rash severity which
alternated with the equally rash pusillanimity of ministers; and
beginning to regard government less as a protection, than as an
encroachment on the natural privileges of a nation of freemen.

They soon had a growing temptation before them in the successful
revolt of America.

We do not now enter into that question; it is too long past. But we
shall never allude to it without paying that homage to truth, which
pronounces, that the American revolt was a rebellion, wholly
unjustifiable by the provocation; utterly rejecting all explanation,
or atonement for casual injuries; and made in the spirit of a
determination to throw off the allegiance to the mother country. But,
if Wilkes could have sustained his opposition but a few years longer,
and with any character but one so shattered as his own, he might have
carried it on through life, and even bequeathed it as a legacy to his
party; until the French Revolution had joined flame to flame across
the Chann