The Washington herald. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1906-1939, 1916-04-02
Bolingbroke
By SAVOYARD.

fury. The house of commons was the
master. and to get action from that
body it was necessary to persuade 1t
or intimIdate it Bolingbroke, then Mr.. !
st. John. a member OF the commons,
attended to the persuading. and Dean
Swift, with that mighty pen of his.
took care Of the intimidation. They
overthrow Marlborough, the greatest
English soldier. and Godolphin. the
Carnot of a victorious and glorious war.
Marlborough and Bolinsbroke.
Gould not stall together
In the whole world"
And certainly not in the little king !
dom Of the British Isles, and that is
how II came that the orator brought
about the rather "stalemate" peace at
Utrecht. sooner than allow the soldier
to force a crushing peace at Paris.
Bolingbroke succeeded because he had
the ear OF the queen, but he would have
been powerless had he not also swayed
parliament by his tongue, perhaps the
most eloquent with which British states |
man was ever endowed.
In Queen Anne's reign. and long after
the accession to the throne OF the house
OF Brunswick, all sessions Of both
houses of the British parliament were
executive" from which the public
were excluded. That speech of the first
Pitt in reply to Walpole, beginning, THE
atrocious crime of being a young man :
shall neither attempt TO palliate nor
to deny" which we young Americans
used to spout at school. was written by
grand cid Samuel johnson. who took
pains that 1.-THE Wing dogs did not get
the best of it," and Pitt never heard Of
it till he read it in The Gentleman
Magazine.
And Bolingbroke's speeches were all
delivered in executive sessions. Had
the stump" been invented at that
ca rlier age. there is little doubt that
he would have brought back in triumph
the Stuart pretender to the throne. or
one of his speeches in the commons
great Englishman said that he would
sooner preserve It to the English tongue
than to discover the lost books of the
Roman historian Lvy.
Sir Robert Walpole was a brave and
resolute man, a very able, practical
statesman, and a wise ruler. He could
have sent Bolingbroke to the scafford,
but instead he suffered his great antag-
onist to employ his pen with the greatest
freedom, and such a pen! Second only to
that Of Swift in that generation OF mar
velously gifted writers. But Walpole,
valorous and msgnanimous minister that
he was. emphatically and obstinately re-
fused TO lift the attainder of Boiling
broke sufficiently to permit him to take
his seat in the house of lords, and that
historical fact is, perhaps, the greatest
compliment ever paid orator. Boiling
broke. attained as he was, and his al
lies finally drove Walpole from power;
but II took a quarter of a century to do
IT Had he been in parliament the
chances are he would have accomplish
ed it in twenty-five months.
1t is the fashion to decry Bolin gbrokes
writings; but would advise every bright
young fellow to read his political and
historical works at least. 1t is a mag
nificent style, and from some of his
political preachments a skilled adapter
could gather a mighty good Democratic
platform for our day right here in our
glorious United States. His chapter on
Exile" which he adapted from Seneca,
is a perennial delight to my taste, and
some remarks he makes about the policy
of King Edward III would give i'm
inca surable satisfaction to American
statesmen such as the late William S.
Holman, 'the great objector." The Let
ter to Sir William Windham" is admir-
able for its preachments and its superb
style. 1t Is well enough 10 leave alone
his assaults on the Christian faith. He
was deist like Tom Paine. and not half
as formidable as that powerful writer IN
that particular field. Bolingbrokes
grandmother. who had charge of him in
his early youth, was a fanatic Puritan.
DR.. Manton. the psalm-singing dissenter.
wrote 119 sermons on the 18th Psalm.
These the old lady compelled her young
grandson to memorize, and we may we'll
assume that this was enough to make an
infdel of him.
But Bolins broke was more than an In
fdcl. He was a drunkard and a de-
hauchee. His conduct was scandalous In
the utmost degree, and a public man of
1fc 1u,- i,, a,,I In, nrIr r.-hn
behavior was half outrageous woul6
be sent to the work house instead of to
parliament or to Congress. At the age of
p. when the war of the Spanish success
sion was at its height and Marlborough
was gathering more laurels on the CONT
nent than came to the Black Prince
even, Bolingbroke resigned the portfolio
Of secretary of war and retired to his
private estate in Buckinhamshire. where
he save out that he was done with poll
tics, that he was discouraged with man
kind, that never again would he have TO
do with any public affair. However, he
allowed such friends as Pope and Swift
Gay and Arbuthnot to visit him, and one
day at dinner, after the ladies had re-
tired and the cloth was removed, he de-
livered himself of his honily about the
simple life, the vanity of human ambi-
tons, and all that. when one of the COM
of his companions. wrote a quatrain
bristling with wit and satire which Swift
a Clergyman OF the established church,
set down in his journal Stella" and
which I had supposed was emphatically
and unqualifedly unprintable in this or
our potter age until l read 1t in one of
the books of the late Justin Mccarthy
that was written less than twenty years
ago! If you read 1t in Swift's works you
will laugh: II you read II in Mccarthy It
Will astound YOU.
Had Bohnsbroke been contemporary
OF Gladstone it is altogether likely that
he would have diverted that extraordi-
nary man. Yet he would have been over
come, in all likelihood, by Palmerstone,
a practical man, just as he was by Wal
pole, an even more practical man than
the later statesman, of whom II was
said, England loves Palmerston for his
l-don't-care-a -damnativeness.'
Mother docking through magazine
Darling, see from statistics given here
that third hah N- horn in the V0rlS