This haughty exclusiveness equally accounts for the contests with Wilkes. They felt themselves affronted, much more than resisted; they were much more stung by the defiance of a private individual to themselves, than they were urged to the collision by any conceivable sense of hazard to the Monarchy. No man, out of bedlam, could conceive, that Wilkes had either the power or the intention to subvert the state. But Mr Wilkes, an obscure man, whose name was not known to the calendar of the government fabricators, had actually dared to call their privilege of power into question; had defied them in the courts of law; had rebuked them in the senate; had shaken their influence in the elections; and had, in fact, compelled them to know, what they were so reluctant to learn, that they were but human beings after all! The acquisition of this knowledge cost them half a dozen years of convulsions, the most ruinous to themselves, and the most hazardous to the constitution. Wilkes' profligacy alone, perhaps, saved the constitution from a shock, which might have changed the whole system of the empire. If he had not been sunk by his personal character, at the first moment when the populace grew cool, he might have availed himself of the temper of the times to commit mischiefs the most irreparable. If his personal character had been as free from public offence as his spirit was daring, he might have led the people much further than the government ever had the foresight to contemplate. The conduct of the successive cabinets had covered the King with unpopularity, not the less fierce, that it was wholly undeserved. Junius, the ablest political writer that England has ever seen, or probably ever will see, in the art of assailing a ministry, had pilloried every leading man of his time except Chatham, in the imperishable virulence of his page. The popular mind was furious with indignation at the conduct of all cabinets; in despair of all improvement in the system; irritated by the rash severity which alternated with the equally rash pusillanimity of ministers; and beginning to regard government less as a protection, than as an encroachment on the natural privileges of a nation of freemen. They soon had a growing temptation before them in the successful revolt of America.