The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so great a triumph that most men assumed them to be capable of any triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in establishing one principle which, up to that time, had never been recognized, the principle that a constitutional sovereign in these countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to listen to reason, and probably not even they knew at the time the full importance of the constitutional principle which they had thus established. In our own days, and under the rule of the first really constitutional sovereign who ever reigned in these countries, we seem to have almost forgotten that there ever was a time when the occupant of the throne was understood to have a right to govern the people according to royalty's own inclination or royalty's own notion of statesmanship. When the passing of the Reform Bill was yet the latest event in history, the people of these countries commonly, and very justly, regarded this assertion of the right of a representative Ministry to exact support from {189} the sovereign as one of the greatest triumphs accomplished by Lord Grey's Administration. The natural feeling therefore was to assume that the men who had done these great things could do greater things still, and from all parts of the realm eyes were turned upon them, full of confidence in their desire and their capacity to accomplish new reforms in every department of our constitutional and our social system.