From that moment Pitt's power was at an end. His pride, his immoveable firmness, and the general confidence of the nation, still kept him at the head of affairs; but he could do little save drift along with a tide of popular feeling which he never fully understood. Around him the country broke out in a fit of passion and panic which rivalled the passion and panic over sea. The confidence of France in its illusions as to opinion in England deluded for the moment even Englishmen themselves. The partisans of Republicanism were in reality but a few handfuls of men who played at gathering Conventions, and at calling themselves citizens and patriots, in childish imitation of what was going on across the Channel. But in the mass of Englishmen the dread of these revolutionists passed for the hour into sheer panic. Even the bulk of the Whig party believed property and the constitution to be in peril, and forsook Fox when he still proclaimed his faith in France and the Revolution. The "Old Whigs," as they called themselves, with the Duke of Portland, Earls Spencer and Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Windham at their head, followed Burke in giving their adhesion to the Government. Pitt himself, though little touched by the political reaction which was to constitute the creed of those who represented themselves as "Pittites," was shaken by the dream of social danger, which was turning the wisest heads about him. For a moment at least his cool good sense bent to believe in the existence of "thousands of bandits" who were ready to rise against the throne, to plunder every landlord, and to sack London. "Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted to him a passage from the _Rights of Man_, in which that author had vindicated the principles of the Revolution. "He is perhaps right; but if I did what he wants I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow and London burnt." It was this sense of social danger which alone reconciled him to the war. It would have been impossible indeed for Pitt, or for any other English statesman, to have stood idly by while France annexed the Netherlands and marched to annex Holland. He must in any case have fought even had France not forced him to fight by her declaration of war. But bitter as the need of such a struggle was to him, he accepted it with the less reluctance that war, as he trusted, would check the progress of "French principles" in England itself.