The politicians at the Dutch embassy imagined that now at length the parliament would listen to reason. It seemed that even the country gentlemen must begin to contemplate the probability of an alarming crisis. The merchants of the Royal Exchange, much better acquainted than the country gentlemen with foreign lands, and much more accustomed than the country gentlemen to take large views, were in great agitation. Nobody could mistake the beat of that wonderful pulse which had recently begun, and has during five generations continued, to indicate the variations of the body politic. When Littleton was chosen speaker, the stocks rose. When it was resolved that the army should be reduced to seven thousand men, the stocks fell. When the death of the Electoral Prince was known, they fell still lower. The subscriptions to a new loan, which the Commons had, from mere spite to Montague, determined to raise on conditions of which he disapproved, came in very slowly. The signs of a reaction of feeling were discernible both in and out of Parliament. Many men are alarmists by constitution. Trenchard and Howe had frightened most men by writing and talking about the danger to which liberty and property would be exposed if the government were allowed to keep a large body of Janissaries in pay. The danger had ceased to exist; and those people who must always be afraid of something, as they could no longer be afraid of a standing army, began to be afraid of the French King. There was a turn in the tide of public opinion; and no part of statesmanship is more important than the art of taking the tide of public opinion at the turn. On more than one occasion William showed himself a master of that art. But, on the present occasion, a sentiment, in itself amiable and respectable, led him to commit the greatest mistake of his whole life. Had he at this conjuncture again earnestly pressed on the Houses the importance of providing for the defence of the kingdom, and asked of them an additional number of English troops, it is not improbable that he might have carried his point; it is certain that, if he had failed, there would have been nothing ignominious in his failure. Unhappily, instead of raising a great public question, on which he was in the right, on which he had a good chance of succeeding, and on which he might have been defeated without any loss of dignity, he chose to raise a personal question, on which he was in the wrong, on which, right or wrong, he was sure to be beaten, and on which he could not be beaten without being degraded. Instead of pressing for more English regiments, he exerted all his influence to obtain for the Dutch guards permission to remain in the island.