It seems unnecessary to remark that of these various injunctions the only one to which the members of Parliament paid any heed was that for the prosecution or persecution of Walpole. Even here there was no result. The new officials were sated and at ease, the hungry remnant was insufficient or inept. But the constituencies were in deadly earnest, if their members were not. They had been goaded by their leaders to a state bordering on frenzy, and their demands, vindictive as they may appear to us, only embodied the declamation of the Opposition throughout half at least of Walpole's ministry. More than ten years before, Pulteney had publicly declared that 'the Opposition had come to a determined resolution not to listen to any treaty whatsoever, or from whomsoever it may come, in which the first and principal condition should not be to deliver him (Walpole) up to the justice of the country.' But now the Opposition was in power, and Pulteney was in a chastened and moderate mood. His star, indeed, was already on the wane; he was on the high road to the earldom of Bath and extinction. At the first meeting indeed with the King's envoys he had declared in a famous phrase that he could not screen Walpole if he would, for 'the heads of parties are like the heads of snakes, which are carried on by their tails.' But at a later conference he said, with reference to the same topic, that he was not a man of blood, and that in all his expressions importing a resolution to pursue the Minister to destruction he meant only the destruction of his power, not his person. He would consult with his friends, yet must confess that so many years of maladministration deserved some parliamentary censure. Accordingly Lord Limerick moved on March 9 (1742) for a select committee of inquiry into the administration of the late Sir Robert Walpole during the last twenty years; but Pulteney did not at first countenance this moderate measure. He was absent, on a reasonable excuse no doubt, and in his absence his friends intimated that it would not be disagreeable to him were the motion rejected. This was, it seems, untrue, but it gave Pitt the first great opportunity of his life. When others were silenced by office or honours, he stood forth as the mouthpiece of the people and as the consistent, incorruptible maintainer of the policy and declarations of his party. It was an opportunity of which he availed himself with terrible effect. It is now, we think, that he first appealed to the imagination and confidence of the nation, as distinguished from the appreciation of Parliament, though that also was sufficiently marked. 'Pitt grows the most popular speaker in the House of Commons, and is at the head of his party,' writes Philip to Joseph Yorke.[138]