ed the
committee of the new regime of the gentry. And considering who it was
who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated by
a trick.

The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into
it like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty
years afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faith
in a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment and
distinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing to
strengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He was
always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not a
royal family, but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book
"The Patriot King," written in exile; and when he thought that George's
great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might be
more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such
unpromising instruments as George III. and Lord Bute; and when these
broke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the _sed victa
Catoni_. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature.
But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is no
better summary than this section from the first to the last of the
foiled _coups d'etat_ of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peace
with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second his
policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection with
Prussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of
Brandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which
has become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch
Chatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representative
sense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of his
own and his country's glory. He summarized the new England of the
Revolution in everything, especially in everything in which that
movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was
most corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways
what we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also
an Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was
consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that
all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically
what may be called a commercialist--one might almost say Carthagini