authority; and any fresh act of cruelty or oppression which accompanied the process stirred in him that tremendous indignation against violence and injustice of which Warren Hastings had learned by stern experience the intensity and the volume.  The Reflections on the French Revolution and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs expressed in the most splendid English which was ever written the dire apprehensions that darkened their author’s receptive and impassioned mind.  “A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over England, and even echoed in all the Courts of Europe.  Burke poured the vials of his hoarded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired imagination.”

Meanwhile the Whig party was rent in twain.  The Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, and Sir George Elliot adhered to Burke.  Fox as stoutly opposed him, and was reinforced by Sheridan, Francis, Erskine, and Grey.  The pathetic issue of the dispute, in Burke’s formal repudiation of Fox’s friendship, has taken its place among those historic Partings of Friends which have modified the course of human society.  As far as can now be judged, the bulk of the country was with Burke, and the execution of Louis XVI. was followed by an astonishing outbreak of popular feeling.  The theatres were closed.  The whole population wore mourning.  The streets rang with the cry “War with France!” The very pulpits re-echoed the summons.  Fox himself was constrained to declare to the electors of Westminster that there was no one outside France who did not consider this sad catastrophe “as a most revolting act of cruelty and injustice.”

But it was too late.  The horror and indignation of England were not to be allayed by soothing words of decorous sympathy from men who had applauded the earlier stages of the tragedy, though they wept at its culmination.  The warlike spirit of the race was aroused, and it spoke in the cry, “No peace with the regicides!” Pitt clearly discerned the feeling of the country, and promptly gave effect to it.  He dismissed Chauvelin, who informally represented the Revolutionary Government in London, and he demanded from Parliament an immediate augmentation of the forces.

On the 20th of January, 1793, France declared war against England.  The great struggle had begun, and that declaration was a new starting-point in the political history of England.  English parties entered into new combinations.  English politics assumed a new complexion.  Pitt’s imperial mind maintained its ascendency, but the drift of his policy was entirely changed.  All the schemes of Parliamentary, financial, and commercial reform in which he had been immersed yielded place to the stern expedients of a Minister fighting for his life against revolution abroad and sedition at home.  For though, as I said just now, popular sentiment was stirred by the King’s execution into vehement hostility to France, still the progress of the war was attended by domestic consequences which considerably modified this sentiment.  Hostility gave way to passive acquiescence, and acquiescence to active sympathy.