George III., a student of Bolingbroke, but a narrow abuser on his first trial of his doctrine, was accused of meaning to dispense with this watchword of oligarchs. But the quarrels of his time proved that what George III. really wanted was to dispense with one party alone, to escape from the dictation of a few governing families, and to choose his own ministers. There may be--there have been--great parties based on principles of disruption and contraction rather than of union and expansion, or parties based on principles more international or continental than national and British. A “national” party does not exclude their existence and criticism, any more than it does that of another “national” party taking another outlook on “general principles.” What it ought more and more to exclude, what the monarch as the centre of union should more and more render impossible, is an anti-national group, and the remedy that Burke suggests for such an ailment is that propounded by Bolingbroke and upheld by Disraeli--the limited and constitutional prerogatives of the Crown--which should render less possible those gangs of office-mongers who, in Bolingbroke’s phrase, pay “a private court at the public expense,” and in Disraeli’s, are “public traders of easy virtue.” These ideas, shared by Bolingbroke, by Burke, by Canning, and by Disraeli, are no tiresome theories, but lively and practical issues. We too must look ahead. How far under modern conditions, and apart from the spasms and clamours of party, can the sovereign power as a force consolidating the Empire be strengthened, and the royal prerogatives wisely displayed in the light of day? Ought a King’s personality to prove also the means of his power? Time will show. CHAPTER VI COLONIES--EMPIRE--FOREIGN POLICY Before Disraeli had entered public life, at a time when public opinion remained stagnant regarding the reciprocal needs and splendid future of the Mother Country and her children, while it was still thought optional whether the parent supported the offspring or the offspring the parent, Disraeli had pondered on the problem, and brought imagination to bear upon it. The colonies were not merely commercial acquisitions, they were the free vents for the surplus energy of a great race, and the nursery gardens of national institutions. In _Contarini Fleming_ he thus muses, dreaming of things to come, in sight of Corcyra--