"A new party of malcontents" had arisen, "assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ...

and endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves." The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English radicalism.
[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.] Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive effort.

David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742) the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by the success of the new work.

The second part, entitled _Political Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the "_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful dissolvent the century was to see.

Yet nowhere was so clearly to be demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.
Hume, of course, is always critical and suggestive, and even if he had no distinctive contribution to make, he gave a new turn to speculation.
There is something almost of magic in the ease with which he demolishes divine right and the social contract.