The needed events of shock were close at hand.

The people of England would never have discovered the real meaning of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles.

When he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the _Present Discontents_ and the _Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights_ are the dawn of a splendid recovery.

And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau.

Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of the eighteenth century.