Looking back historically, he discerned that some hundred and twenty years before the birth of English Liberalism, a country and “Old England” party, perplexed by dynastic and economic problems, confronted too by the semi-scientific rationalism of a new age, had been first schooled into comprehensive, generous, and “national” aspirations by a great but lost leader, and had then been baffled by a set of great families. Most of these began by professing Republican principles, and all of them were branded in the literature of Queen Anne as the “Venetian oligarchy.” These families aimed steadily for more than a century at engrossing the whole power of the State. Their bias from 1700 to Sunderland’s peerage bill in 1718, and from 1718 to the Reform Bill of 1831 remained Republican. But so long as a king was content to be a puppet dancing on their wires, and the nation to be cowed into lethargy, they could dispense with theoretical forms, mainly upheld as a ladder towards oligarchical power. From time to time they assumed popular causes, but somehow they never succeeded in themselves being popular, because their chief object as a party organisation was “the establishment of an oligarchical government by virtue of a Republican cry;”[58] because, as Disraeli has again shown, English revolutions have always been in favour of privilege traditionally distributed, while foreign revolutions have been against all privilege whatever; because the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne and the first two Georges sought a _tabula rasa_--a plain map, as opposed to the picture with perspective of English institutions. They were theoretically for “liberty and property”--the “_New_ Whig” catchword of Queen Anne’s reign that replaced the old one of “Liberty” alone, in which both Whigs and Tories joined at the revolution--but their bias was always more for property than for liberty. They sought to amass money and power through the amassing classes. They never studied the varied interests of the whole nation. Walpole usurped their place, but retained their influence, and by his virtue George I. reigned rather than ruled over the towns instead of over the country. At first these oligarchs kicked against the growing management of a sole minister, but the shrewd steadiness of a superior will overmastered them, and Newcastle remained on Walpole’s side--the insignificant representative of their tamed confederacy. Trade ceased to follow the land, but tended more and more to acquire it by purchase, until a fresh moneyed oligarchy, which acquired fresh titles, was formed. The great Chatham broke it for a time; and afterwards George III. obstinately mutinied against its shackles. The French overthrow transformed the Whig cry of Republicanism to the Whig cry of Jacobinism. “... Between the advent of Mr. Pitt and the resurrection of Lord Grey, ... ever on the watch for a cry to carry them into power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for