principles, and, ‘while leaving the flag of church privilege still flying,’ to secure to dissenters by the indirect method of indemnity acts a substantial emancipation. The city had been whig from the revolution, and when it came to a question of alienating his financial supporters by lowering the interest on government loans, or risking the allegiance of the whig country gentlemen by taxing them to find the higher rate, he preferred the general interests of his party to the immediate interest of his class. Twice he found himself confronted by a storm of popular fury, in the matter of the excise bill and the war with Spain. On both occasions he gave way, not from weakness, but in pursuance of a principle observed by him, even in his own cabinets, never to let his own opinion prevail against a majority (Horatio Lord Walpole, Memoirs, i. 328).
In the time of Walpole parliament had become absolute. He maintained this supremacy, but he changed the centre of gravity from the House of Lords to the House of Commons; and this he effected by the force of his own personality, despite the fact that he did not belong to one of the great aristocratic families. It was impossible that power should continue to emanate from a house of which the sovereign's chief adviser, the minister who engrossed the direction of every department of domestic policy, was not a member. With this change came the development of parliamentary management, an art of which Chesterfield acknowledged Walpole to have been the greatest master that ever lived (Letters, iii. 1417). ‘He knew the strength and weakness of everybody he had to deal with’ (Hervey, Memoirs, i. 23). The saying attributed to him, ‘Every man has his price’ unfairly conveys an impression of general cynicism. ‘All those men,’ he said of ‘the patriots,’ ‘have their price’ (Coxe, i. 757; Hervey, Memoirs, i. 242; Walpoliana, i. 88). Their subsequent history and the judgment of their contemporaries proved the saying true. But this talent of shrewd insight had its associated defect. The arts of management may suit a House of Commons; they cannot touch the multitude. It was the perception of this weak point, the ‘delusion that the majority of the House of Commons is the majority of the nation’ (Marchmont Papers, ii. 123), that led the opposition, and Pitt among them, in George II's famous phrase, ‘to look for the sense of my subjects in another place than the House of Commons’ (Horace Walpole, Memoirs, ii. 331). Before the force of public passion the minor arts of management broke down.
Upon the transfer of power to the House of Commons followed as a consequence that the ministry was no longer dependent upon the caprice of the sovereign. The change was not recognised at once. Sunderland, Townshend, and Carteret, all members of the House of Lords, conceived of ministers as the personal servants of the kings, and each in turn became a competitor with the rest of the cabinet for the largest share of the royal favour. This tendency explains and justifies the unreasonable jealousy of his colleagues generally attributed to Walpole. ‘He was unwilling,’ says Hervey, ‘to employ anybody under him, or let anybody approach the king and queen, who had any understanding, lest they should employ it against him’ (Memoirs, i. 340). In place of the traditional system, or want of system, he insisted that a ministry should be jointly and severally responsible, and that in its communications with the sovereign it should be represented by its head (ib. i. 187, 200). Of this collective responsibility the guarantee was party connection. The change involved, as the opposition truly alleged, the appearance in the constitution of a prime minister (see Lords' Protests of 13 Feb. 1741; Rogers, ii. 10), and the extinction of composite administrations of intriguing courtiers. It was not the outcome of any preconceived view of the right principles of government on Walpole's part. The principle of the ministry's collective responsibility was formulated by him, probably not for the first time, in 1733, when his excise scheme was thwarted by his own subordinates (Hervey, Memoirs, i. 187, 200). Politics with him lay not in the application of theories, but in the ‘providing against the present difficulty that presses’ (Walpole to Hervey in 1737, Memoirs, iii. 56), always with an eye to the paramount interest, the maintenance of the protestant succession. He declared, if we may credit Chesterfield, that he was ‘no saint, no Spartan, no reformer.’ Political life was the transaction of state's business; not, as with Sunderland or Carteret, one of the distractions of an elegant leisure. He himself spoke of his position as being ‘in business’ (Shelburne, Life, i. 37). He was the first minister since the Restoration who made a special study of finance and commerce. He laid the foundations of free-trade and of modern colonial policy. His capacity of lucid exposition of finance was such that ‘whilst he was speaking the most ignorant thought that they understood what they really did not’ (Chesterfield, Letters, iii. 1417). ‘He never had his equal in business,’ said George I. His transaction of it was marked by the method, tranquillity,
