Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 362, December 1845Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 362, December 1845
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
We do not now enter into that question; it is too long past. But we
shall never allude to it without paying that homage to truth, which
pronounces, that the American revolt was a rebellion, wholly
unjustifiable by the provocation; utterly rejecting all explanation,
or atonement for casual injuries; and made in the spirit of a
determination to throw off the allegiance to the mother country. But,
if Wilkes could have sustained his opposition but a few years longer,
and with any character but one so shattered as his own, he might have
carried it on through life, and even bequeathed it as a legacy to his
party; until the French Revolution had joined flame to flame across
the Channel, and England had rivalled even the frenzy of France in the
rapidity and ruin of her Reform.
Fortunately, the empire was rescued from this most fatal of all
catastrophes. A great English minister appeared, on whom were to
devolve the defence of England and the restoration of Europe. The
sagacity of Pitt saw where the evil lay; his intrepidity instantly
struck at its source, and his unrivalled ability completed the saving
operation. He broke down the cabinet monopoly. No man less humiliated
himself to the populace, but no man better understood the people. No
man paid more practical respect to the peerage, but no man more
thoroughly extinguished their exclusive possession of power. He formed
his cabinet from men of all ranks, in the peerage and out of the
peerage. The great peers chiefly went over to the opposition. He
resisted them there, with as much daring, and with as successful a
result, as he had expelled them from the stronghold of government. He
made new peers. He left his haughty antagonists to graze on the barren
field of opposition for successive years; and finally saw almost the
whole herd come over for shelter to the ministerial fold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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