From Hume until the publication of Burke's _Present Discontents_ (1770) there is no work on English politics of the first importance. Walpole had fallen in 1742; but for the next fifteen years his methods dominated the parliamentary scene. It was only with the advent of the elder Pitt to power that a new temper may be observed, a temper quickened by what followed on the accession of George III. Henceforward, it is not untrue to say that the early complacency of the time was lost; or, at least, it was no longer in the ascendant again until the excesses of the French Revolution enabled Burke to persuade his countrymen into that grim satisfaction with their own achievement of which Lord Eldon is the standing model. The signs of change are in each instance slight, though collectively they acquire significance. It was difficult for men to grumble where, as under Walpole, each harvest brought them greater prosperity, or where, as under Chatham, they leaped from victory to victory. Something of the exhilaration of these years we can still catch in the letters which show the effort made by the jaded Horace Walpole to turn off with easy laughter his deep sense of pride. In the House of Commons, indeed, there is nothing, until the Wilkes case, to show that a new age has come. It is in the novels of Richardson and Fielding, the first shy hints of the romantic temper in Gray and Collins, above all in the awakening of political science, that novelty is apparent. So far as a new current of thought can ever be referred to a single source, the French influence is the effective cause of change. Voltaire and Montesquieu had both visited England in the period of Walpole's administration, and both had been greatly influenced by what they saw. Rousseau, indeed, came later on that amazing voyage which the good-natured Hume insisted would save him from his dread of persecution, and there is evidence enough that he did not relish his experience. Yet when he came, in 1762, to publish the _Contrat Social_ it was obvious that he had drunk deeply of English thought. The real meaning of their work to Englishmen lay in the perspective they gave to English institutions. Naturally enough, there was a vast difference between the simplicity of a government where sovereignty was the monarch's will and one in which a complex distribution of powers was found to secure a general freedom. The Frenchmen were amazed at the generous equality of English judicial procedure. The liberty of unlicensed printing--less admirable than they accounted it--the difference between a _Habeas Corpus_ and a _lettre de cachet_, the regular succession of Parliaments, all these impressed them, who knew the meaning of their absence, as a magnificent achievement. The English constitution revealed to France an immense and unused reservoir of philosophic illustration. Even to Englishmen itself that meaning was but partly known. Locke's system was a generalization from its significance at a special crisis.