presentatives of quiet rural districts, where
loyalty is mostly to be found, if anywhere. But after the accession of
George III. the common feeling came back to the same point as in Queen
Anne's time. The English were ready to take the new young prince as the
beginning of a sacred line of sovereigns, just as they had been willing
to take an old lady, who was the second cousin of his
great-great-grandmother. So it is now. If you ask the immense majority
of the Queen's subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell
you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne, c. 7.
They will say she rules by "God's grace"; they believe that they have a
mystic obligation to obey her. When her family came to the Crown it was
a sort of treason to maintain the inalienable right of lineal
sovereignty, for it was equivalent to saying that the claim of another
family was better than hers: but now, in the strange course of human
events, that very sentiment has become her surest and best support.

But it would be a great mistake to believe that at the accession of
George III. the instinctive sentiment of hereditary loyalty at once
became as useful as now. It began to be powerful, but it hardly began
to be useful. There was so much harm done by it as well as so much
good, that it is quite capable of being argued whether on the whole it
was beneficial or hurtful. Throughout the greater part of his life
George III. was a kind of "consecrated obstruction". Whatever he did
had a sanctity different from what any one else did, and it perversely
happened that he was commonly wrong. He had as good intentions as any
one need have, and he attended to the business of his country, as a
clerk with his bread to get attends to the business of his office. But
his mind was small, his education limited, and he lived in a changing
time. Accordingly, he was always resisting what ought to be, and
prolonging what ought not to be. He was the sinister but sacred
assailant of half his ministries; and when the French Revolution
excited the horror of the world, and proved democracy to be "impious,"
the piety of England concentrated upon him, and gave him tenfold
strength. The Monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our
political order; in George III.'s time it confirmed little except
itself. It gives now a vast strength to the entire Constitution, by
enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses;
then it lived aloo