and that he is not ready to take up or lay down a great political
system for the convenience of the hour; that he is in Parliament to
support his opinion of the public good, and does not form his opinion
in order to get into Parliament or to continue in it."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Two Letters to Gentlemen in Bristol_, 1778.]

A small instalment of humanity to Ireland was not more distasteful to
the electors of Bristol than a small instalment of toleration to Roman
Catholics in England. A measure was passed (1778) repealing certain
iniquitous penalties created by an Act of William the Third. It is
needless to say that this rudimentary concession to justice and sense
was supported by Burke. His voters began to believe that those were
right who had said that he had been bred at Saint Omer's, was a Papist
at heart, and a Jesuit in disguise. When the time came, _summa dies et
ineluctabile fatum_, Burke bore with dignity and temper his dismissal
from the only independent constituency that he ever represented. Years
before he had warned a young man entering public life to regard and
wish well to the common people, whom his best instincts and his
highest duties lead him to love and to serve, but to put as little
trust in them as in princes. Burke somewhere describes an honest
public life as carrying on a poor unequal conflict against the
passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons
than passions and prejudices of our own.

The six years during which Burke sat in Parliament for Bristol, saw
this conflict carried on under the most desperate circumstances. They
were the years of the civil war between the English at home and the
English in the American colonies. George III. and Lord North have been
made scapegoats for sins which were not exclusively, their own. They
were only the organs and representatives of all the lurking ignorance
and arbitrary humours of the entire community. Burke discloses in many
places, that for once the king and Parliament did not act without the
sympathies of the mass. In his famous speech at Bristol, in 1780, he
was rebuking the intolerance of those who bitterly taunted him for the
support of the measure for the relaxation of the Penal Code. "It is
but too true," he said in a passage worth remembering, "that the love,
and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is
but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made
up of pride, perverseness, an