Over the dark night of the 18th and the dull grey morning of the 19th century there was this remarkable feature, that while the local records show how deplorable was the condition of the people, there was at the head of the affairs of the nation a perfect galaxy of great men, such as the public life of this nation had perhaps never known. There were Fox, Pitt, Sheridan, Burke, Wellington, Wilberforce, Nelson, Canning, Brougham, Lord Chancellor Eldon--whose greatness was only tempered by the fear that the sun of Great Britain would set if a Catholic was allowed to sit in the House of Peers,--the Duke of York--whose speech against Catholic emancipation was printed in letters of gold and sold by our local stationers,--the great Lyndhurst (four times Lord Chancellor) Palmerston, Lord Derby, who, from a maiden speech about lighting Manchester with gas, rose to be "the Rupert of Debate," Macaulay--the brilliant Buntingford school boy who went stamping through the fields of literature with an _eclat_ which made him one of the giants of the coming century,--O'Connell, the Liberator; and Grattan, of Irish {156} Parliament fame. All these great names made up a reflection of the glories of Ancient Greece and Rome in the arena of debate. They shone like stars in the firmament, helping to make the common people content to dwell in the night by the glittering panoply they threw over the public life of the nation. Men and women forgot their grievances in the contemplation of great names whose owners did not then, like the statesmen of to-day, come down to the level of the common life to be jostled on railway platforms. It is only when one looks into the details of local life that it is possible to realize the sharp contrast of great men and little happiness for the people, or how terrible must have been the strain for the whole nation to have existed under such conditions without a revolution. The marvel is that Parliament with so much talent in its foremost men should have been powerless to deal with the weakness outside, or that the brilliant leaders should have been content to reach such an eminence by so rough and thorny a path; but the great forces which have been liberated within this century had not then set men's energies free, and they were pretty much confined to, and did not see much beyond, the narrow way along which they were toiling. Parliamentary Reform, for which more enlightened men here and there had for fifty years been asking, was the first setting of the tide which was to penetrate and revolutionize all our local life. Early in the present century when the then Lord Dacre contested Cambridgeshire, and had the audacity to advocate Parliamentary Reform and Civil and Religious Liberty, he was called the Fire-Brand, and he had few supporters when, in 1810, he moved for an inquiry into the state of Parliamentary representation.