Steam-engine; while the House of Commons was occupied in expelling Wilkes, Arkwright was inventing the Spinning-frame; and the great English newspapers were day by day attracting to themselves a larger capital and showing increased enterprise. The old Whigs, however, forgetting that the Revolution had to a great extent been rendered successful by the support of the commercial classes, resolutely shut their eyes to the signs of the times, and seemed determined not to look beyond the charmed circle of their own family connections. George III. was no wiser. Had he been the Patriot King whose advent had been announced, had he set worthy objects before himself and known how to attain them, he might have had an easy triumph over his adversaries; nor would he have had far to go to find proper instruments for an enlightened policy in the followers of Chatham, who made "measures not men" their motto. At one moment it seemed as if he had understood the true character of the situation. "The ministry of 1766," says Shelburne, "was formed of those who recognised that the Hanover family was become English, and the old mode of false government worn out and seen through. It was proposed no longer to sacrifice all merit and worth in Army, Navy, Church and State, to the miserable purpose of corrupting a majority of the House of Commons, but that the Crown should trust to the rectitude of its own measures, taking care by a scrupulous regard to merit, and a just distribution of honors, to secure a general conviction of its good intentions, and under that conviction to restore the constitution."[1] It is doubtful, however, whether the Ministry of 1766 could have had any other termination than failure, even had Chatham not succumbed to illness, for George III., far from resembling the Patriot King, had apparently studied the precedents of royalty in the Stuart period, but without either learning wisdom or taking warning from their example. The objects he set before himself were the extension of his prerogative, the limitation of the political
- ↑ "A Fragment of Lord Shelburne's." Lansdowne House MSS.
