themselves either a powerful or a successful opposition, much less a dominant party. The fault of this is often laid at the door of Pitt. It is thought that he sacrificed the Whig party to his own overpowering egotism and passion for personal eminence. But the responsibility seems

at least equally due to Burke, who more than once failed to seize the happy moment, and unite the factions of the Whig party on a single line of policy. Burke's passion for precise distinctions was at least as marked as Pitt's for personal power, and much valuable time was lost in debates to prove that the Rockingham Whigs were not only always right, but could never be wrong, that would better have been spent in working out the details of practical and unifying compromise. All this, however, on the supposition that the situation admitted of compromise, and that the doctrines of the Rockingham Whigs really deserved to prevail. On this point it must be admitted that, whatever Burke's feeling, his action was dignified rather than politic. He made his faction respectable but not efficient, and left it admired, but fallen short of the highest influence.

Burke had been returned to the House of Commons for the pocket borough of Wendover, in the interest of Lord Verney, and from January 27, 1766, became a maker of speeches as well as a writer of pamphlets. The Rockingham ministry had repealed the Stamp Act in its short tenure of office, but had accompanied the repeal with a declaratory act asserting the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies. In 1769 Burke replied to a pamphlet of George Grenville defending his own policy, by another entitled Observations on a late Publication on the Present State of the Nation. Here he showed his grasp of the principles of finance as well as of liberal statesmanship. In the same year he bought an estate at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, for £22,000. Where he got the money, has been

an absorbing question to Burke's critics and detractors. The fact seems to be that he did not really get it at all, but by means of a mortgage on two-thirds of the property, never paid off during Burke's lifetime, and with money borrowed from Lord Rockingham, and with the proceeds of a small property inherited from his brother, he anticipated the accumulations of his entire lifetime from all sources. The re

sult was that he lived on a large and generous scale, and was always in debt. He gratified his tastes for books, pictures, hospitality, and charity. As in the dark days of his early life in London he shared his last guinea with the Armenian, Joseph Emin, so in his much wider, but hardly less precarious life, he helped the poet Crabbe and the young Irish artist Barry. In this course, irregular as it seems, and disagreeable as it must have been, Burke was on the whole justified by events. Lord Rockingham in his will directed that all Burke's notes, amounting to some £30,000, should be destroyed, and the rest of the indebtedness was discharged by Mrs. Burke after her husband's death. Socially, Burke played a leading rôle. He was a member of Johnson's famous club at the Turk's Head, and though Johnson asserted that the first Whig was the devil, and would not discuss the Rockingham ministry with him, even so staunch a Tory was compelled to admit "his knowledge, his genius, his diffusion and affluence of conversation."

In 1770 appeared the Thoughts on the Course of the Present Discontents. In 1771 he was appointed agent for the colony of New York with a salary of £500 a year. On the dismissal of the Duke of Grafton, Lord North became head of the government, and from 1770 to 1782 the criticisms of Burke's Thoughts were writ large in the public policy and its lamentable results for all clear-sighted men to read. But few men were clear-sighted. Burke's warnings were interpreted as factious opposition; the very point

of highest public interest was missed, and to-day it is uncertain how much clearer-sighted in regard to the practical issues Burke was than the rest of his generation, for all his warnings. In 1774 he was returned to Parliament, free of expense, by the city of Bristol. This was the only time that Burke sat in Parliament as representative of an independent constituency. In 1775, after many debates, the famous speech introducing thirteen resolutions for conciliation with America was made. In 1777 appeared the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. In 1778 he supported Lord Nugent's effort to remove the trade restrictions in Ireland, but in 1785 opposed Pitt's efforts to secure the abolition of those remaining. His scheme for economical reform he brought forward in 1780. It was quite as much an attack on prevailing abuses of the government as a system of improved economy, and so succeeded only in part. From 1781 to the close of his life, two great interests occupied him. The first was the misgovernment of India, the other the doctrine and excesses of the French Revolution. He sat on a committee of inquiry into Indian affairs in 1781, in 1783 assisted in drawing up Fox's East India Bill, opposed Pitt's bill on the same subject, and from 1788 to 1794 conducted the impeachment of Warren Hastings for tyrannical abuse of his power as governor-general of India. In 1785 Burke had delivered one of his most famous speeches, on The Nabob of Arcot's Debts, but the trial of Hastings failed to hold the public interest, or to convince it that Hastings was a bad man as well as a great man. Burke, however, wrote: "If I were to call for a reward, it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success. I mean in the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance, most for the labor, most for the judg

ment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit."

Burke's opposition to the French Revolution was constant, unqualified, and uncompromising. To it he sacrificed his friendship with Sheridan, and the much dearer one with Fox. His course has been considered puzzling and inconsistent, but it is really neither. Burke had two passions, one for justice, the other for order. But the love of neither was for an abstraction. Not justice as such, nor order as such, was dear to him, but justice to worthy persons and institutions, order, vested, ascertained, and embodied in established society. The same strength and the same weakness that prevented Burke from saying the final word in American affairs, however luminous his intelligence up to a certain point, made him almost hysterical in what he considered the fatal menace of French example. Over his speeches and pamphlets on the subject he toiled terribly. The most famous are Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790; An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 1791; Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796.

After Burke's rejection by the electors of Bristol, he had sat for the borough of Malton, and in 1794 applied for the Chiltern Hundreds in favor of his son Richard, whom he had most carefully educated as a statesman and politician, and for whom he had the most extravagant affection and expectations. The death of Richard Burke broke his father's heart, but did not destroy his eloquence, which flamed up for the last time in the famous Letter to a Noble Lord, written in reply to an attack by the Duke of Bedford in the House of Lords on the impropriety of the Crown's granting a pension to Burke, without the consent of Parliament. Burke died at Beaconsfield, July 8, 1797.