and it is to be said to their credit that they used their
power freely to introduce unknown young men of talent into public life.
Moreover in many cases, if not in most, small boroughs, however well
peopled, were expected to elect the proprietor's nominee. Burke after
leaving Hamilton's service was for a short time private secretary to
Lord Rockingham, when the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in
1766; but when he went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765
in the manner we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from
Lord Verney, who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same
year, and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man
of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register had
to be.

[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE.]

A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a
pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing
public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not
exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its
appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely
after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably
achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of
the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class.
As a rule the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even if it also
freely expounded. It was inevitable that Burke should early begin to
wield this most powerful of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready
for him in the person of George Grenville, the minister who had made way
for Burke's friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as
easily as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his
friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of the
finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures, and a
familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a power of
exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the fundamental
conditions of national economy, which at once made him famous and a
necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle with the Crown on
which they were entering.

The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief space
than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne down to
the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent effort to
govern through ministe