e was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generations
of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; something
which had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity,
something called _Punica fides_. The great Royalist Strafford, going
disillusioned to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes." The
great Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And least
of all in merchant princes."

Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big
in English history, but which with the recent winding of the course of
history has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannot
understand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, the
best English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yet
modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full of
it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, as
well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is
full of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem "The Deserted
Village," and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in
"The Vicar of Wakefield." Swift is full of it; and found in it an
intellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the time
of Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people in
England. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun to
rule.

This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many
aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the
virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields"
that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king
is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also
involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his
oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the
populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and
though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his
soul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly
rationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine
and typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear
and classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurous
spirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw for
the Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobles who form