Some Reflections on the Early Years of George III's Reign

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with “political history” — with the problems of the statesman who looks at the situation from above and has to make decisions about it. Granted that conditions are of a given sort and that society has a certain form — granted that men are what they are and events have produced a predicament that calls for action — there are people who have a presiding position and an over-all responsibility; and their strategies and decisions are themselves an object of study. A crucial question of “political history” is the question of the kind of statesmanship that was necessary for operating the constitution as it existed in the early years of George III's reign. On this subject one who does not speak with the authoritarian voice of the expert may claim that the experts should be carefully scrutinized, especially in a world now terribly subject to intellectual fashion. But one who has always valued originality (and has been reproved even for measuring historians by this quality) is in a predicament — calling, now, for the reverse of this, and wanting, rather, to recover continuity with an earlier stage of historiography. Whereas at the present time new evidence, manuscript sources, and the thrill of the hitherto-undiscovered fact are always prized, this paper must take on the dull work of making sure that some old material is not neglected, material which, if it appeared in print long ago, did so only because its importance was so obvious from the first.