EXTRACTS FROM G. O. TREVELYAN'S GEORGE THE THIRD AND CHARLES FOX.

But corruption, and servility, and perverted party spirit, were still1 powerful enough to maintain the ministerial members at their usual figure; and the address was carried by two hundred and forty-three votes to eighty-six. Gibbon, who went with the majority, told Horace Walpole that, if it had not been for shame, there were hardly twenty men in the House who were not ready to vote for peace. "I did not," said Walpole, "think it very decent for so sensible a man to support the war, and make such a confession."

The House was terribly excited. It was one of those sudden storms of passionate emotion when men of high character and dignity are betrayed into actions which they never afterwards love to remember. Burke taunted the Solicitor-General with having accepted a retainer as standing counsel for such a client as Lord George Germaine; and Wedderburn told Burke that he did not know how to behave himself, and must be taught 'In the autumn of 1777.

to mend his manners. Burke walked out of the House, making a sign for Wedderburn to follow; and their friends had some difficulty in averting a duel which might have resulted in a catastrophe almost too serious to contemplate.

George the Third knew his House of Commons by heart, and he could read the signs of the political weather better than any of his Cabinet. He was too strong a man to underrate the abilities of those whom he disliked; he recognized the extraordinary powers of Charles Fox; and he was not blind to the growing influence of one in whom he had long seen an antagonist, and now began to foresee a rival. Moreover he set great store on Sandwich, who was a statesman exactly to his mind. Subservient in the Closet, masterful and overbearing in the Cabinet, and a fearless bully in debate, the First Lord of the Admiralty was always ready to accept the King's views on policy, to impose them upon his own colleagues, and to champion them against all comers in Parliament. Such a Minister was too precious to be thrown away or abandoned, however unseemly his private life, and however deplorably mismanaged might be the public department committed to his care. George the Third had been greatly alarmed when Fox so very nearly carried his first vote of censure on the third of March.1 As soon as the master learned that a servant, whom he highly valued, had

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only been saved from a crushing condemnation by a small margin of votes, he at once resolved upon sharp and uncompromising action. The division had taken place late at night; and the next morning, before most of those who bore a part in it had left their beds, King George was already expressing to Lord North by letter his indignation at the number of Ministerialists who had shamefully failed in their duty, and his determination to adopt any means, which he could personally take, in order to suppress such irregularities in the future. "The list of the House of Commons," he wrote, "has I trust been so accurately prepared that there will be no difficulty in knowing whose attention must be quickened. I trust Lord North will not let his usual good nature accept excuses upon this occasion. It is the good of my service that calls forth severity." Severe enough, in all conscience, his Majesty showed himself. He left it to the Prime Minister to see that all defaulters in civil employment were "strongly spoke to"; and meanwhile he took into his own hands the officers of the Army, who abounded in the House of Commons, and who for the most part shared the feelings of the Navy with regard to Lord Sandwich. The King desired the Acting Commander-inChief of the Forces to call to account the colonels, captains, and subalterns; and he stated it as his decided opinion that generals, who held those governorships of fortresses which were the special prizes of the service, should lose them for opposing the wishes of the Crown. That trebling of the Government majority, which took place on the second vote of censure, affords a remark

able indication of the multitude of place-men who then sat in Parliament, and a measure of the King's industry and dexterity in manipulating a division-list. His strength of will was seldom more effectually displayed than when, with public sentiment almost unanimously against him, he kept Lord Sandwich safe in office on the morrow of a flagrant personal scandal, and on the eve of a fresh naval war. England was condemned to encounter Spain, as well as France, in mortal combat, with that Old Man of the Sea triumphantly and irremovably mounted on her shoulders.

The liberties of Britain had been in jeopardy from the moment when George the Third, in the full vigor of early manhood, and with a force of will, and determination of purpose, which almost reached the level of genius, set himself deliberately to build up a solid and enduring structure of personal government. To main. tain in power ministers of his own choice, irrespective of the estimation in which they were held by their countrymen; to exercise his veto on legislation, not by announcing through the mouth of the Clerk of the Parliaments that the King would further consider the matter, but by contriving that the measures which he disapproved should be defeated in the Lobby of one or another of the two Houses; "to secure to the Court the unlimited and uncontrolled use of its vast influence, under the sole direction of its private favor"; those were the objects which he pursued, and attained, by methods opposed to the spirit, but compatible with

the processes, of the Constitution. The King had the wit to see "that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary, government," might be reconciled by course of action which avoided the outward show of despotism. Before he had been ten years on the throne he was in a fair way to succeed where Charles the First and James the Second had failed; and his policy, while less fraught with peril to the safety of the monarch than was the policy of the Stuarts, was infinitely more demoralizing to the character of the nation. George the Third had no occasion to march his Guards to Westminster, or commit the leaders of the Opposition to the Tower of London, as long as he could make sure of a parliamentary majority by an unscrupulous abuse of Government patronage, and, where need was, by direct and downright bribery. "The power of the Crown," said Burke, "almost dead and rotten as Prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength, and far less odium, under the name of Influence." Everything, so this famous patriot declared, had been drawn from its holdings in the country to the personal favor of the prince. That favor was the sole introduction to office, and the sole tenure by which it was held; until at last servility had become prevalent, and almost universal, "in spite of the dead letter of any laws and institutions whatsoever.'

The machinery of corruption was worked under the habitual and minute supervision of the King; and with good reason. In previous reigns the leaders of both parties-Harley and Bolingbroke, and Walpole and