These ideas animated him throughout, and he achieved them in 1867, not, though it has been insinuated, by filching the proposals of his predecessors, but on the opposed principles which he continued to advocate from the ’thirties to the ’sixties. In 1835, two years before he entered Parliament, he expressed the same convictions in his _Spirit of Whiggism_. He showed that the two Houses were the “House of the Nation,” not the “House of the People,” but that both alike represent the “Nation.” He proceeded to prove by powerful illustration that, under whatever assumed form, political power will follow the distribution of property. He emphasised the “passion for industry” as an instrument of wealth as an English characteristic hostile to any future revolution in the distribution of property. He proved that in England revolution is ever a struggle for privilege, in Europe one against it; and he concluded, therefore, that “... If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land.... _The Whigs in the present day have risen on the power of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance._ But the new interest has obtained its object and is content.... The manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played the same game with the commercial interest. A century has passed, and the commercial interests are all as devoted to the Constitution as the manufacturers soon will be.... The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution, _founded on an equality of civil rights_. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, _is in fact a noble democracy_?”