In the political world again we have the first appearance of a distinctly democratic movement. The struggle over Wilkes during the earlier years began a contest which was to last through generations. The American War of Independence emphasised party issues, and in some sense heralded the French Revolution. I only note one point. The British 'Whig' of those days represented two impulses which gradually diverged. There was the home-bred Whiggism of Wilkes and Horne Tooke--the Whiggism of which the stronghold was in the city of London, with such heroes as Lord Mayor Beckford, whose statue in the Guildhall displays him hurling defiance at poor George III. This party embodies the dissatisfaction of the man of business with the old system which cramped his energies. In the name of liberty he demands 'self-government'; not greater vigour in the Executive but less interference and a freer hand for the capitalist. He believes in individual enterprise. He accepts the good old English principle that the man who pays taxes should have a voice in spending them; but he appeals not to an abstract political principle but to tradition. The reformer, as so often happens, calls himself a restorer; his political bible begins with the great charter and comes down to the settlement of 1688. Meanwhile the true revolutionary movement--represented by Paine and Godwin, appeals to the doctrines of natural equality and the rights of man. It is unequivocally democratic, and implies a growing cleavage between the working man and the capitalists. It repudiates all tradition, and aspires to recast the whole social order. Instead of proposing simply to diminish the influence of government, it really tends to centralisation and the transference of power to the lower classes. This genuine revolutionary principle did not become conspicuous in England until it was introduced by the contagion from France, and even then it remained an exotic. For the present the Whig included all who opposed the Toryism of George III. The difference between the Whig and the Radical was still latent, though to be manifested in the near future. When the 'new Whigs,' as Burke called them, Fox and Sheridan, welcomed the French Revolution in 1789, they saw in it a constitutional movement of the English type and not a thorough-going democratic movement which would level all classes, and transfer the political supremacy to a different social stratum.