I would not be understood as saying that Burke’s speeches were impartial. They were not. He had preferences which amounted to prejudices. He was always an intense party man. But then he was a party man with a difference. He believed that the interests of England were bound up with the fortunes of the Rockingham Wings; but he did not separate the interests of his party and the interests of his country. He cherished party connections because he conceived them to be absolutely necessary for effective public service. “Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles,” he said, “nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes or dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public.” “When bad men combine, the good must associate.” “It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth, that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country.... Duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Burke believed the Rockingham Whigs to be a combination of good men, and he felt that he ought to sacrifice something to keep himself in their connection. He regarded them as men who “believed private honor to be the foundation of public trust; that friendship was no mean step towards patriotism; that he who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in a public situation, might probably consult some other interest than his own.” He admitted that such confederacies had often “a narrow, bigoted, and prescriptive spirit;” “but, where duty renders a critical situation a necessary one,” he said, “it is our business to keep free from the evils attendant upon it; and not to fly from the situation itself. If a fortress is seated in an unwholesome air, an officer of the garrison is obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must not desert his station.” “A party,” he declared, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” “Men thinking freely, will,” he very well knew, “in particular instances,