immense advantages, of his
Parliaments. Himself, for great part of his life, an active and popular
member of the House of Commons, he saw that not only it was impossible
to do without it, but that, if fairly, honourably, honestly dealt with,
it would become a source of power and confidence which would double the
strength of the Government both at home and abroad. Yet of all this
wisdom nothing came. The finance of the kingdom was still ruined by
extravagance and corruption in a time of rapidly-developing prosperity
and wealth. The wounds of Ireland were unhealed. It was neither peace
nor war with Spain, and hot infatuation for its friendship alternated
with cold fits of distrust and estrangement. Abuses flourished and
multiplied under great patronage. The King's one thought about
Parliament was how to get as much money out of it as he could, with as
little other business as possible. Bacon's counsels were the prophecies
of Cassandra in that so prosperous but so disastrous reign. All that he
did was to lend the authority of his presence, in James's most intimate
counsels, to policy and courses of which he saw the unwisdom and the
perils. James and Buckingham made use of him when they wanted. But they
would have been very different in their measures and their statesmanship
if they had listened to him.

Mirabeau said, what of course had been said before him, "On ne vaut,
dans la partie executive de la vie humaine, que par le caractere." This
is the key to Bacon's failures as a judge and as a statesman, and why,
knowing so much more and judging so much more wisely than James and
Buckingham, he must be identified with the misdoings of that ignoble
reign. He had the courage of his opinions; but a man wants more than
that: he needs the manliness and the public spirit to enforce them, if
they are true and salutary. But this is what Bacon had not. He did not
mind being rebuffed; he knew that he was right, and did not care. But to
stand up against the King, to contradict him after he had spoken, to
press an opinion or a measure on a man whose belief in his own wisdom
was infinite, to risk not only being set down as a dreamer, but the
King's displeasure, and the ruin of being given over to the will of his
enemies, this Bacon had not the fibre or the stiffness or the
self-assertion to do. He did not do what a man of firm will and strength
of purpose, a man of high integrity, of habitual resolution, would have
done. Such men insist