the chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in order to take the throne by storm, that nothing was wanting but to hoist the tricolour and to cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This fatal blunder clipped the wings of Whiggism; nor is it possible to conceive a party that had effected so many revolutions and governed a great country for so long a period more broken, sunk, and shattered, more desolate and disheartened, than these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris.” But all proved fruitless, until at last the vast body of the nation--the real “people”--reasserted themselves, and, by emphasising Parliamentary reform, compelled oligarchs, mistrustful of them at heart,[59] to “do something.” What they “did” was to aggrandise the middle classes, on whom they had always relied; and a new revolution was the consequence. Throughout more than a century and a half, despite noble and national intervals, they constantly betrayed themselves as a “faction who headed a revolution with which they did not sympathise, in order to possess themselves of a power which they cannot wield.” In 1718 they “sought to govern the country by swamping the House of Commons.” In 1836 they were for “swamping” the House of Lords. Their drift was continued against the national institutions, the conjoined independence and inter-dependence of which thwarted their inveteracy. Their plan in the end became avowedly cosmopolitan; and when that occurred it became doubly dangerous, for to “centralisation”--monopoly of power--was added the no-principle of “_laissez-faire_,” the abandonment of leadership to chaos. The great national struggle against Napoleon practically obliterated party distinctions in England, although there was still a remnant of those who are, in Burke’s words: “... the most pernicious of all factions, one in the interest and under the direction of foreign powers.” A lull ensued. Both Toryism and Whiggism withered; the first from sheer inanition of those popular principles which Canning in vain sought to rekindle; the second from the sheer impossibility of withstanding the name of Wellington and the memories of Waterloo. Toryism turned against freedom and Liberalism against order. Public spirit waned with the decay of party opposition. The great warriors dwindled into petty place-men until “Where are the Grenvilles? Turned as usual. Where My friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were;” until the “Marney” of _Sybil_ expired “in the full faith of dukeism and babbling of strawberry leaves.”