“I think I hear a little bird, who sings The people by and by will be the stronger.”[293] Such lines as these show a maturity and an earnestness that mark the evolution of Byron’s satiric spirit from the hasty petulance of _English Bards_ to the humanitarian breadth of his thoughtful manhood. Like “Young Azim” in Moore’s _Veiled Prophet of Khorassan_, he is eager to march and command under the banner on which is emblazoned “Freedom to the World.” It is characteristic of Byron’s later satire that he applied his theory of liberty to the current problems of British politics by assailing the obnoxious domestic measures instituted by the Tory ministry of Lord Liverpool, by condemning the English foreign policy of acquiescence in the legitimist doctrines of Metternich and the continental powers, and by attacking the characters of the ministers whom he considered responsible for England’s position at home and abroad. The England of the time of _Don Juan_ was the country which Shelley so graphically pictured in his _Sonnet: England in 1819_:-- “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, ... Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know, But leech-like to their fainting country cling, Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, ... A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.” It was a nation exhausted by war, burdened with debt, and seething with discontent. The Luddite outbreaks, the “Manchester Massacre,” which so excited the wrath of Shelley, and the “Cato Street Conspiracy” showed the temper of the poor and disaffected classes. Unfortunately the cabinet saw the solution of these difficulties not in reform but in repression, and preferred to put down the uprisings by force rather than to remove their causes. For these conditions Byron blamed Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary. Byron had never met Castlereagh and had never suffered a personal injury from him; his rage, therefore, was directed solely at the statesman, not at the man. The Secretary had long been detestable to Irish Whigs like Moore[294] and English radicals like Shelley[295]; it remained for Byron to track him through life with venomous hatred and to pursue him beyond the grave with scathing epigrams. For anything comparable aimed at a man in high position we must go back to Marvell’s satires on Charles II and the Duke of York or to the contemporary satire in 1762 on Lord Bute. Byron’s Castlereagh has no virtues; the portrait, like Gifford’s sketch of Peter Pindar, is all in dark colors. The satire is vehement and personal, without malice and without pity.