current of patriotic sentiment and aspiration. But public opinion was not yet powerful enough to support the great minister without an alliance with the master of the small arts of intrigue. The general sentiments of discontent which had been raised by Walpole was therefore beginning to widen and deepen and to take a different form. The root of the evil, as people began to feel, was not in the individual Walpole but in the system which he represented. Brown's _Estimate_ is often noticed in illustration. Brown convinced his readers, as Macaulay puts it, that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels, who richly deserved the fate in store for them of being speedily enslaved by their enemies; and the prophecy was published (1757) on the eve of the most glorious war we had ever known. It represents also, as Macaulay observes, the indignation roused by the early failures of the war and the demand that Pitt should take the helm. Brown was a very clever, though not a very profound, writer. A similar and more remarkable utterance had been made some years before (1749) by the remarkable thinker, David Hartley. The world, he said, was in the most critical state ever known. He attributes the evil to the growth of infidelity in the upper classes; their general immorality; their sordid self-interest, which was almost the sole motive of action of the ministers; the contempt for authority of all their superiors; the worldly-mindedness of the clergy and the general carelessness as to education. These sentiments are not the mere platitudes, common to moralists in all ages. They are pointed and emphasised by the state of political and social life in the period. Besides the selfishness and want of principle of the upper classes, one fact upon which Hartley insists is sufficiently familiar. The Church it is obvious had been paralysed. It had no corporate activity; it was in thorough subjection to the aristocracy; the highest preferments were to be won by courting such men as Newcastle, and not by learning or by active discharge of duty; and the ordinary parson, though he might be thoroughly respectable and amiable, was dependant upon the squire as his superior upon the ministers. He took things easily enough to verify Hartley's remarks. We must infer from later history that a true diagnosis would not have been so melancholy as Hartley supposed. The nation was not corrupt at the core. It was full of energy; and rapidly developing in many directions. The upper classes, who had gained all they wanted, were comfortable and irresponsible; not yet seriously threatened by agitators; able to carry on a traffic in sinecures and pensions, and demoralised as every corporate body becomes demoralised which has no functions to discharge in proportion to capacities. The Church naturally shared the indolence of its rulers and patrons. Hartley exhorts the clergy to take an example from the energy of the Methodists instead of abusing them. Wesley had begun his remarkable missionary