The American colonies took alike their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke provided them with the main elements of justification.

The very quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her political system was compared with the governments of France and Germany.

Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was gathered.

The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory party a new lease of power.

There is throughout the time an over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendency to confound the private good of the governing class with the general welfare of the state.