It was as the representative of this temper of the people at large, of its mingled mood of terror at the new developements of freedom and yet of faith in freedom itself, of its dread of progress and yet its hope of a time when a larger national life should again become possible, that Pitt had gathered the nation round him from the opening of the war. Much indeed of the seeming weakness and uncertainty of his statesmanship throughout the struggle sprang from the fidelity with which he reflected this double aspect of national opinion. He has been blamed for fighting the French Revolution at all, as he has been blamed for not entering on an anti-revolutionary crusade. But his temper was that of the nation as a whole. He shrank from the fanaticism of Burke as he shrank from the fanaticism of Tom Paine: his aim was not to crush France or the Revolution, but to bring the struggle with them to such an end as might enable England to return in safety to the work of progress which the struggle had interrupted. And it was this that gave significance to his fall. It was a sign that the time had come when the national union which Pitt embodied must dissolve with the disappearance of the force that created it; when resistance had done its work, and the arrest of all national movement had come to an end with the attitude of mere resistance from which it sprang; when in face of a new France and a new French policy England could again return to her normal political life, and the impulses towards progress which had received so severe a check in 1792 could again flow in their older channels. In such a return Pitt himself took the lead; and his proposal of Catholic emancipation was as significant of a new era of English life as the Peace of Lunéville was significant of a new settlement of Europe. [Sidenote: Catholic Emancipation.]