[Sidenote: _'WILKES AND LIBERTY'_] Wilkes desired nothing better than persecution. He was nothing of a patriot, but only a vulgar schemer who worked for notoriety and gain, and his craft, together with the inconceivable stupidity of the Government in making a martyr of him, assured him of both. The warrants for his arrest and for the seizure of his papers were declared illegal, and the numerous actions-at-law which he brought against members of the Cabinet and prominent officials in respect of those illegal proceedings, cost the Government which defended them no less than £100,000. Wilkes now reprinted "Number 45," and a majority in the House of Commons ordered the paper to be burned by the common hangman, and on January 19, 1764, voted his expulsion from the House, as the author of a scandalous and seditious libel. He was convicted in the Court of King's Bench for having re-published the obnoxious "Number 45," but did not present himself to receive sentence. He fled, in fact, to France, and resided there for four years, an outlaw. Twice he returned to England and unsuccessfully petitioned an incredibly obstinate and stupid King for a pardon, which, it is scarcely necessary to add, George III. refused to grant. On the second occasion a general election was in progress, and this agitator then sought re-election to Parliament, and stood for the City of London. Defeated in the City, he issued his election address the following day as a candidate for the county of Middlesex, and was returned triumphantly at the head of the poll. "Wilkes and Liberty!" was now the popular cry, and the member for Middlesex became more than ever the darling of the mob, the idol of the populace. But the extraordinary stupidity of King, Court, and Government, that had raised so utterly worthless and degraded a fellow as Wilkes to this high pinnacle, kept him there by another expulsion from the Commons, and by fines and imprisonment inflamed the anger of the crowd to such a pitch that Benjamin Franklin said, with every appearance of conviction, "that had Wilkes been as moral a man as the King, he would have driven George III. out of his kingdom." So strong were prejudices in favour of superficial morality in even that licentious age!