And now for the consequence: the popular spirit, thus set at naught in present account and in calculation for the future, was discouraged from active outward manifestation, by the invetorate, perfectly organized, and, for the present, resistless domination. But under the pressure of wide-spread and unabating grievance, which quickened and envenomed every sentiment previously entertained regarding the rights and wrongs of the people, it was gradually acquiring, throughout the country, a more determinate sense of being absolved from all submissive respect toward the ascendant party, a more entire conviction of its right to vindicate its claims in any manner that should become practicable, and a hostility, but the more deep and intense for its being kept under by despondency of present success, against those who were rejecting and contemptuously defying those claims. It wanted, then, only some occurrence that should present a possibility and a hope of success to burst out in sudden ardor. It was thus in collective power and readiness for action, when several events of prodigious excitement came close together; and then, like a stream in one of the Swiss valleys, dammed up by a mound of earth or ice fallen across, to a lake deepening without noise, till its vast weight breaks away the obstruction with a tremendous tumult, the popular will bore down the aristocratic embankment, consolidated through so many years or ages. The overpowered party found the consequence of their obstinate and _entire_ resistance; and had to reflect with unmixed mortification how much less than they had lost, and without mitigating by the loss the hostile feeling of those who had taken it from them, would have been received with gratitude if yielded in the way of gradual voluntary concession. Happily the change was not left to be accomplished by physical force, as all such changes must be in purely despotic states; but the people fully believe that they chiefly owe the forced surrender to the alarm which their demonstrations excited lest they should bring the question ere long to that arbitrament.