9. THE POLITICAL PARTIES— TO 1906. Party government begins, in primitive society, with the struggle for power, the nature of which is determined in each case by local and tribal conditions, and by the influence of men who are or aspire to be leaders. At a later stage, when abstract logic is applied to questions of policy, the parties begin to argue from principles; they profess themselves friends of the people, friends of the better class, and so forth. The principles invoked are not scientific propositions; they are rather forms of language, such as are received with favor in a mixed assembly; the party-leader uses them so as to combine opin ions and interests, to draw together a working majority. Each party borrows freely what seems to be effective and popular in the pro gram of its opponents. Moderate men of all parties think very much alike; they are kept apart by the personal struggle for power.
These general truths are well illustrated by the contest between Whigs and Tories in the 17th century. The Whigs were an aristocratic party, relying on the nobles, the landed gentry, and the city of London. Their principle was, the supremacy of the law : they were determined that the courts which administer the law and the high court of Parliament which makes the law, should be freed from the arbitrary inter ference of the king. Moderate Tories did not undervalue the law; they argued that by law the king was entitled to obedience, and that the king then reigning had done nothing to forfeit his claim. The Whigs carried their point in 1688, by bringing in a foreign king, William of Orange, a capable, magnanimous man, not less firmly attached to his royal prerogative than the Stuart kings had been. With the advent of the House of Hanover in 1714, Whig principles came once more to the front; for the first George and his son were Germans; they needed an interpreter between the king and the peo ple; and the statesman who could manage the House of Commons was not, like Strafford or Clarendon, dependent on the support of his royal master. George III on the other hand was a patriotic Englishman; he thought himself strong enough to choose his own ministers and to throw off the yoke of the Whig nobles.
If he had possessed the administrative talent of Fredrick the Great he might have made himself the head of the government and set himself above the parties. But King George was neither a great statesman nor a great soldier; he relied too much on the smaller arts of political man agement; and in the middle of his long reign he came under 'the influence of a minister whose commanding character excluded the king from the personal conduct of national business. It is to Pitt that we owe the outline of our modern constitution. At Windsor he was the servant of the Crown, arguing, often in vain, against the obstinate purpose of his master. In the cabinet he was himself master; he chose his colleagues, and dismissed them when they opposed his pol icy. In the House of Commons, which was still an aristocratic body, his ascendency was never seriously disputed, and he filled the House of Lords with peers of his own creation. So it was that Pitt, by birth and training a Whig, be came the founder of the new Tory party.
Pitt's opinions were those of an official Lib eral. He wished to reform the electoral system, to remove religious disabilities, to relax the rigor of laws which prevented the expansion of trade. But the fates had imposed upon him the task of steering the ship of State through a period of wars and revolutions : the work of re form was postponed to the necessities of for eign and domestic policy. When the great min ister died, his unfinished schemes fell into the hands of men with whom postponement was a settled habit. During the long Tory adminis tration of Lord Liverpool there was, in prin ciple, but little difference between the parties. The middle classes were impatient, and some of them joined the workingmen in declaring that neither of the aristocratic parties could be trusted. These independent men called them selves radical reformers, and they sympathized with the aspirations of democracy in America, in Ireland, and on the continent of Europe.