Yet Dr. Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the _Idler_ as one "whose business it is to watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself." Much of what he felt was in part a revolt against the sentimental aspect of contemporary liberalism, in part a sturdy contempt for the talk of degeneracy that men such as Brown had made popular. There is, indeed, in all his political observations a strong sense of the virtue of order, and a perception that the radicalism of the time was too abstract to provide an adequate basis for government. Here, as elsewhere, Johnson hated all speculation which raised the fundamental questions. What he did not see was the important truth that in no age are fundamental questions raised save where the body politic is diseased. Rousseau and Voltaire, even Priestley and Price, require something more for answer than unreasoned prejudice. Johnson's attitude would have been admirable where there were no questions to debate; but where Pelham ruled, or Grenville, or North, it had nothing to contribute. Thought, after all, is the one certain weapon of utility in a different and complex world; and it was because the age refused to look it in the face that it invited the approach of revolution. CHAPTER VI BURKE I It is the special merit of the English constitutional system that the king stands outside the categories of political conflict. He is the dignified emollient of an organized quarrel which, at least in theory, is due to the clash of antagonistic principle. The merit, indeed, is largely accidental; and we shall miss the real fashion in which it came to be established unless we remark the vicissitudes through which it has passed. The foreign birth of the first two Hanoverians, the insistent widowhood of Queen Victoria, these rather than deliberate foresight have secured the elevated nullification of the Crown. Yet the first twenty-five years of George III's reign represent the deliberate effort of an obstinate man to stem the progress of fifty years and secure once more the balance of power. Nor was the effort defeated without a struggle which went to the root of constitutional principle.