the prime minister, the accepted head of the Party and of the Cabinet. As the king did not preside, the minister who did preside discharged many functions of the king. The power of governing the country was practically transferred. It was shared, not between the minister and the king, but between the head of the ministry and the head of the opposition. For Party implies the existence of a party which is out as well as a party that is in. There is a potential ministry ready for office whenever the majority is shifted. As Walpole remained twenty-one years in office, he ignored this part of the constitutional system. He never became a leader of opposition, and when he resigned, no such thing had been provided. "All the talents" were opposed to him, but they were not an organised opposition. They were discontented and offended Whigs, assailing ministers on no ground of principle. This form of opposition was instituted by Pulteney, when he quarrelled with Walpole. Pulteney founded the Craftsman, in which there was much good political writing. For Bolingbroke had returned to England, and as he was not allowed to resume his seat in the Lords, he could make his power felt only through his pen. As he was thoroughly cured of his Jacobite sympathies, the doctrine he proclaimed was a Toryism stripped of the reactionary element. He proposed to make the State dominate over all the interests—land, Church, trade, and the like. That this might be done, and the government by a class for a class abolished, he appealed to the crown. The elevation of the State over the dominant classes had been the part of intelligent Monarchy in every age. And it is the spell by which Bolingbroke transformed Toryism and introduced the party called the King's Friends, which became a power in the middle of the century, and was put an end to by Mr. Pitt, after losing America, and setting up an English rival to England. After the final fall of the Stuarts in 1746, this was the moving force of Toryism, and the illiberal spirit was seriously curbed. Macaulay goes so far as to say that the Tories became more liberal than the Whigs.
