Excerpt from Sheridan, Vol. 2 of 2: From New and Original Material; Including a Manuscript Diary by Georgina Duchess of Devonshire

Fox; so much SO that he was publicly rebuked for being a rebel, and publicly denounced as Peisistratus, the King of West minster, by one who called him out, but afterwards warmly espoused his cause.1 His ideas were crude and abstract, nor could he calculate their issues. But Fox's mentor in the league against Lord North was a far finer Spirit. If Fox was the father of agitation, Burke was the member for the Constitution which also came to be interwoven with Fox's theories.

Freedom is a term far more elastic than authority. The abstract Constitution was Burke's holy of holies, the perfect unity of the Constitution his dogma. But in fact the Constitu tion was not a definite, still less an unalterable system, nor a set of fixed rules, though Bolingbroke had formulated its doctrines. What it really meant, apart from its Checks and balances, was the supremacy of Parliament, while that predominance, or as some thought it, usurpation, stood for the reign and permanence of Law. The English Revolution ended one form Of arbitrary power, though of a fresh kind it held the germs. Wealth lay behind Parliament. The Revolution had effected a fresh limitation of monarchy. To-day democracy limits the throne oligarchy limited it for the Georgians. The Whig oligarchs, the great Revolution families, purposed to perpetuate their dynasty, and against these, obstinate kings and a stagnant people struggled in vain. Their influence, yearly centred and cumulative, crept down, as it were, like a glacier into the green valleys of generous impulse so freezing and stealthy proved its march downwards. Burke, while he rested on Revolution logic, long abetted these monopolists, who eventually crushed him.

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