advancing the cause of improvement.

In parliament, the advent of party

was vital to the legitimation of opposition. The modern notion that the
executive needs to be kept in check by official and constant organs of
opposition was not so obvious to the monarchical cast of mind. As late as
1757 it was a common view that "a form'd general Opposition" was one of
"the most wicked combinations that men can enter into - worse and more
corrupt than any administration."24 Opposition, partisan opposition, conflicted
with deep-rooted notions of duty, loyalty, law, and providence, it
conflicted indeed with the posture of the main opposition group, the
"Country" or "Country party."
The ideology of the Country was ostensibly a non-ideology. The Country
had no principles nor programs beyond restraining the government: its
most profound instinct was that that government governs best which
governs least. Responsible government is prudent, low-taxing, and respectful
of existing private, local, or parliamentary privileges. This was the
view of landowners who saw their lands as entitling, even obliging, them to
participate in local government and central decision-making. The Country
wanted frequent parliaments full of independent men, and purged of
placemen, so that they could properly scrutinize the executive; small armies
and, better still, blue water policies; and an end to foreign entanglements.
Country ideology could be seen as a set of immediate opposition slogans or
as an instinctive substratum of the Tory party, but it also grew out of a
notion of political virtue.
The Country outlook with its deferential, conservative values overlapped
with a tradition of opposition which owed much to the republican
Commonwealthmen of the 1650s. This tradition's central premise was that
civic virtue was constantly in danger of corruption, that luxury or the
human instinct to consume was a vice which politicians repeatedly
exploited to deprive free people of their liberty. The moral health of the
polity depended on a class of men possessing sufficient property to be able
to play an independent part in government. What was dangerous was the
growth of a class whose wealth flowed from investment in the government
and upon whom the government was dependent for war funds. Such views
were shared by a number of political leaders and political analysts who can
be classified as Whigs of one kind or another; but by the time of Walpole
the same ideas were being employed by figures like Swift, Bolingbroke, and
Pope, who have to be seen as Tories. One helpful characterization of these
disparate figures is that they spoke the political language of virtue rather
than that of rights; in other words, they stressed the danger that voters,
MPs, and parliament might become corrupt and abdicate their political
responsibilities, whereas rights theorists laid more emphasis on the threat