able," said he on the 21st of February, 1792, "to expect that the peace which we now enjoy should continue at least fifteen years, since at no period of the British history, whether we consider the internal situation of this kingdom or its relation to foreign powers, has the prospect of war been farther removed than at present."

In pursuance of this feeling of security, he, in the course of the session of 1791-2, repealed taxes to the amount of 200,000l. a year, made considerable reductions in the naval and military establishments, and allowed the Hessian Subsidy to expire, without any movement towards its renewal. He likewise showed his perfect confidence in the tranquillity of the country, by breaking off a negotiation into which he had entered with the holders of the four per cents. for the reduction of their stock to three per cent.-saying, in answer to their demand of a larger bonus than he thought proper to give, "Then we will put off the reduction of this stock till next year." The truth is, Mr. Pitt was proud of his financial system;-the abolition of taxes and the Reduction of the National Debt were the two great results to which he looked as a proof of its perfection; and while a war, he knew, would produce the very reverse of the one, it would leave little more than the name and semblance of the other.

The alarm for the safety of their establishments, which at this time pervaded the great mass of the people of England, carried the proof of its own needlessness in the wide extent to which it spread, and the very small minority that was thereby left to be the object of apprehension. That in this minority, (which was, with few exceptions, confined to the lower classes,) the elements of sedition and insurrection were actively at work, cannot be denied. There was not a corner of Europe where the same ingredients were not brought into ferment; for the French

waiting for the occasion of war, but that, in our partiality for a pacific sys tem, we had indulged ourselves in a fond and credulous security, which wisdom and discretion would not have dictated."

Revolution had not only the violence, but the pervading influence of the Simoom, and while it destroyed where it immediately passed, made itself felt every where. But, surrounded and watched as were the few disaffected in England, by all the rank, property and power of the country,animated at that moment by a more than usual portion of loyalty, the dangers from sedition, as yet, were by no means either so deep or extensive, as that a strict and vigilant exercise of the laws already in being, would not have been abundantly adequate to all the purposes of their suppression.

The admiration, indeed, with which the first dawn of the Revolution was hailed had considerably abated. The excesses into which the new Republic broke loose had alienated the worship of most of its higher class of votaries, and in some, as in Mr. Windham, had converted enthusiastic admiration into horror;-so that, though a strong sympathy with the general cause of the Revolution was still felt among the few Whigs that remained, the profession of its wild, republican theories was chiefly confined to two classes of persons, who coincide more frequently than they themselves imagine,-the speculative and the ignorant.

The Minister, however, gave way to a panic which, there is every reason to believe, he did not himself participate, and in going out of the precincts of the Constitution for new and arbitrary powers, established a series of fatal • precedents, of which alarmed Authority will be always but too ready to avail itself. By these stretches of power he produced-what was far more dangerous than all the raving of club politicians-that vehement reaction of feeling on the part of Mr. Fox and his followers, which increased with the increasing rigour of the government, and sometimes led them to the brink of such modes and principles of opposition, as aggressions, so wanton, upon liberty alone could have either provoked or justified.

The great promoters of the alarm were Mr. Burke, and those other Whig Seceders, who had for some time taken

part with the administration against their former friends, and, as is usual with such proselytes, outran those whom they joined, on every point upon which they before most differed from them. To justify their defection, the dangers upon which they grounded it, were exaggerated; and the eagerness with which they called for restrictions upon the liberty of the subject was but too worthy of deserters not only from their post but from their principles. One striking difference between these new pupils of Toryism and their master was with respect to the ultimate object of the war. Mr. Pitt being of opinion that security against the power of France, without any interference whatever with her internal affairs, was the sole aim to which hostilities should be directed; while nothing less than the restoration of the Bourbons to the power which they possessed before the assembling of the Etats Genereaux could satisfy Mr. Burke and his fellow converts to the cause of Thrones and Hierarchies. The effect of this diversity of objects upon the conduct of the war-particularly after Mr. Pitt had added to "Security for the future," the suspicious supplement of "Indemnity for the past"-was no less fatal to the success of operations abroad than to the unity of councils at home. So separate, indeed, were the views of the two parties considered, that the unfortunate expedition, in aid of the Vendean insurgents in 1795, was known to be peculiarly the measure of the Burke part of the cabinet, and to have been undertaken on the sole responsibility of their ministerial organ, Mr. Windham.

It must be owned, too, that the object of the Alarmists in the war, however grossly inconsistent with their former principles, had the merit of being far more definite than that of Mr. Pitt; and, had it been singly and consistently pursued from the first, with all the vigour and concentration of means so strenuously recommended by Mr. Burke, might have justified its quixotism in the end by a more speedy and less ruinous success. As it was, however, the divisions, jealousies and alarms which Mr. Pitt's views towards a future dismemberment of France excited not only

among the Continental powers, but among the French themselves, completely defeated every hope and plan for either concert without or co-operation within. At the same time, the distraction of the efforts of England from the heart of French power to its remote extremities, in what Mr. Windham called "a war upon sugar-islands," was a waste of means as unstatesman-like as it was calamitous, and fully entitled Mr. Pitt to the satire on his policy, conveyed in the remark of a certain distinguished lady, who said to him, upon hearing of some new acquisition in the West Indies, "I protest, Mr. Pitt, if you go on thus, you will soon be master of every island in the world except just those two little ones, England and Ireland."*

That such was the light in which Mr. Sheridan himself viewed the mode of carrying on the war recommended by the Alarmists, in comparison with that which Mr. Pitt in general adopted, appears from the following passage in his speech upon Spanish affairs in the year 1808

"There was hardly a person, except his Right Honourable Friend near him, (Mr. Windham,) and Mr. Burke, who since the Revolution of France had formed adequate notions of the necessary steps to be taken. The various governments which this country had seen during that period were always employed in filching for a sugar-island, or some other object of comparatively trifling moment, while the main and principal purpose was lost and forgotten."

Whatever were the failures of Mr. Pitt abroad, at home his ascendancy was fixed and indisputable; and, among all the triumphs of power which he enjoyed during his career, the tribute now paid to him by the Whig Aristocracy, in taking shelter under his ministry from the dangers of Revolution, could not have been the least gratifying to his haughty spirit. The India Bill had ranged on his side the King and the People, and the Revolution now brought to his banner the flower of the Nobility of both parties. His own estimate of rank may be fairly collected both from the indifference which he showed to its honours himself, and

* Mr. Sheridan quoted this anecdote in one of his speeches in 1794.

from the depreciating profusion with which he lavished them upon others. It may be doubted whether his respect for Aristocracy was much increased, by the readiness which he now saw in some of his high-born opponents, to volunteer for safety into his already powerful ranks, without even pausing to try the experiment, whether safety might not have been reconcileable with principle in their own. It is certain that, without the accession of so much weight and influence, he never could have ventured upon the violations of the Constitution that followed-nor would the Opposition, accordingly, have been driven by these excesses of power into that reactive violence which was the natural consequence of an effort to resist them. The prudent apprehensions, therefore, of these Noble Whigs would have been much more usefully as well as honourably employed, in mingling with, and moderating the proceedings of the friends of Liberty, than in ministering fresh fuel to the zeal and vindictiveness of her enemies.*

It may be added, too, that in allowing themselves to be persuaded by Burke, that the extinction of the antient Noblesse of France portended necessarily any danger to the English Aristocracy, these Noble persons did injustice to the strength of their own order, and to the characteristics by which it is proudly distinguished from every other race of Nobility in Europe. Placed, as a sort of break-water, between the People and the Throne, in a state of double

The case against these Noble Seceders is thus spiritedly stated by Lord Moira:

"I cannot ever sit in a cabinet with the Duke of Portland. He appears to me to have done more injury to the Constitution and to the estimation of the higher ranks in this country than any man on the political stage. By his union with Mr. Pitt he has given it to be understood by the people, that either all the constitutional charges which he and his friends for so inany years urged against Mr. Pitt were groundless, or that, being solid, there was no difficulty in waving them when a convenient partition of powers and emoluments was proposed. In either case the people must infer that the constitutional principle which can be so played with is unimportant, and that parliamentary professions are no security." Letter from the Earl of Moira to Colonel McMahon, in 1797. Parliamentary History.