upon. Here was the home of Parliamentarism, genuine and quite inimitable, which had insular position instead of the state as its starting-point, and the habits of the First and not the Third Estate as its background. Further, there was the circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it. The Parliamentary style was completely identical with that of cabinet-diplomacy;[1] and in this anti-democratic origin lay the secret of its successes.
But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate — Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. "Liberty" self-evidently meant intellectual and trade freedom. An opposition between fact-politics and enthusiasm for abstract truths was as impossible in the England of George III as it was inevitable in the France of Louis XVI. Later, Edmund Burke could retort upon Mirabeau that "we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen." France received her revolutionary ideas without exception from England, as she had received the style of her absolute monarchy from Spain. To both she imparted a brilliant and irresistible shape that was taken as a model far and wide over the Continent, but of the practical employment of either she had no idea. The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords[2] in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained. Hence in England it was successful. But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics — not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the "nursing" of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money;[3] England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread "free" opinion — it generates it.
Both together constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings — freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination
- ↑ Both the old parties possessed clear lines of tradition back to 1680.
- ↑ The moral and political "Enlightenment" movement was in England also a product of the Third Estate (Priestley and Paley, Paine, Godwin), and for that reason was unable to grasp things with the fine discrimination of a Shaftesbury.
- ↑ Pelham, the successor of Walpole, paid to members of the Commons, through his secretary, £500 to £800 at the end of each session according to the value of the services rendered by each recipient to the Government — i.e., the Whig party. The party agent Dodington described his parliamentary activities in these words: "I never attended a debate if I could help it, and I never missed a division that I could possibly take part in. I heard many arguments that convinced me, but never one that influenced my vote."
