From the Academy

The political management of a great state indeed is a necessary evil. Everything in politics has been tried before, it seems; nothing has worked very well in the past; nothing seems calculated io work very well in the future.. This melancholy vaticination leads me to some remarks upon a new book about the prime mover in what became the model for responsible party in our age—the English party called the Rockingham Whigs.

The second (and last) Marquis of Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, was prime minister, briefly, twice in the reign of George HI: at the time of the controversy over the Stamp Act, and shortly after the British surrender at Yorktown. Rockingham’s influence brought Edmund Burke to political eminence. The moderate Whigs around Rockingham enjoyed, in a quarter of a century, only two conspicuous successes: repeal of the Stamp Act (though that did not prevent the American Revolution) and the “Economical Reform,” which reduced corruption and increased efficiency in what we would now call the civil service.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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The political management of a great state indeed is a necessary evil. Everything in politics has been tried before, it seems; nothing has worked very well in the past; nothing seems calculated io work very well in the future.. This melancholy vaticination leads me to some remarks upon a new book about the prime mover in what became the model for responsible party in our age—the English party called the Rockingham Whigs.

The second (and last) Marquis of Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, was prime minister, briefly, twice in the reign of George HI: at the time of the controversy over the Stamp Act, and shortly after the British surrender at Yorktown. Rockingham’s influence brought Edmund Burke to political eminence. The moderate Whigs around Rockingham enjoyed, in a quarter of a century, only two conspicuous successes: repeal of the Stamp Act (though that did not prevent the American Revolution) and the “Economical Reform,” which reduced corruption and increased efficiency in what we would now call the civil service.