ation was scarcely more extensive respecting the
people over whom he was called to rule. In that immense mass of
evidence now extant, and which consists of every description of
private correspondence, records of private conversation and of public
acts, there is not to be found the slightest proof that he knew any
one of those numerous things which the governor of a country ought to
know; or indeed, that he was acquainted with a single duty of his
position, except that mere mechanical routine of ordinary business
which might have been effected by the lowest clerk in the meanest
office in his kingdom.

The course of proceeding which such a king as this was likely to
follow could be easily foreseen. He gathered round his throne that
great party, who, clinging to the tradition of the past, have always
made it their boast to check the progress of their age. During the
sixty years of his reign, he, with the sole exception of Pitt, never
willingly admitted to his councils a single man of great ability; not
one whose name is associated with any measure of value either in
domestic or in foreign policy. Even Pitt only maintained his position
in the state by forgetting the lessons of his illustrious father, and
abandoning those liberal principles in which he had been educated, and
with which he entered public life. Because George III hated the idea
of reform, Pitt not only relinquished what he had before declared to
be absolutely necessary, but did not hesitate to persecute to the
death the party with whom he had once associated in order to obtain
it. Because George III looked upon slavery as one of those good old
customs which the wisdom of his ancestors had consecrated, Pitt did
not dare to use his power for procuring its abolition, but left to his
successors the glory of destroying that infamous trade, on the
preservation of which his royal master had set his heart. Because
George III detested the French of whom he knew as much as he knew of
the inhabitants of Kamchatka or of Tibet, Pitt, contrary to his own
judgment, engaged in a war with France by which England was seriously
imperiled, and the English people burdened with a debt that their
remotest posterity will be unable to pay. But, notwithstanding all
this, when Pitt, only a few years before his death, showed a
determination to concede to the Irish some small share of their
undoubted rights, the King dismissed him from office; and the King's
friends, as they were called,