These things, it may be urged, were merely straws, yet straws show the way the wind blows, and Ministers saw enough to be sure that it was not blowing in their favour. They were afraid to face the country. They therefore brought forward the Septennial Act, which repealed the Triennial Act, and enacted that Parliament should sit, if the Government thought fit, for the space of seven years. The Bill was carried through both Houses and became the law of the land. The action of the Government in thus shirking an appeal to the country certainly lent colour to the Jacobite contention, that the nation, as a whole, was in favour of the return of the Stuarts, and that it desired nothing so much as to send George and the Hanoverian family back to Hanover at the earliest opportunity. Allowing for Jacobite exaggeration, it seems probable that the people who, less than three years before, had voted in favour of the Hanoverian succession, would now, had an opportunity been given them, have voted against it. These violent vacillations of public opinion may be used as an argument against popular government. But the Whigs posed as the party of popular government, and if it be admitted, as they declared, that the people have a right to choose their King, it is difficult to see how the Whigs could logically have been justified in maintaining upon the throne a prince who was not supported by the suffrages of the people. But such speculation is merely academic. For good or evil the Septennial Act was passed, and its passing, far more than the failure of James’s expedition, fixed the House of Hanover upon the throne. That was one result, and perhaps the most important. Another was that it gave an impetus to the bribery and corruption by which Walpole, and those who succeeded him, were able to buy majorities in the House of Commons and the constituencies, and thus for more than a century prevented the voice of the nation making itself effectively heard. It led to the establishment, not of government by the people, for the people, but of a Whig oligarchy, who were able to hold place and power in spite of the people.