Among the causes which produced this change were the immense increase of national burdens; the sudden agglomeration of a lawless population in the manufacturing towns which the war called into being; the growing difficulties in Ireland, where revolutionary theories found ready learners; the absolute abandonment of all attempts at social and political improvement; the dogged determination of those in authority to remedy no grievance however patent, and to correct no abuse however indefensible.

The wise and temperate reforms for which the times were ripe, and which the civil genius of Pitt pre-eminently qualified him to effect, were not only suspended but finally abandoned under the influence of an insane reaction.  The besotted resistance to all change stimulated the desire for it.  Physical distress co-operated with political discontent to produce a state of popular disaffection such as the whole preceding century had never seen.  The severest measures of coercion and repression only, and scarcely, restrained the populace from open and desperate insurrection, and thirty years of this experience brought England to the verge of a civil catastrophe.

Patriotism was lost in partisanship.  Political faction ran to an incredible excess.  The whole community was divided into two hostile camps.  Broadly speaking, the cause of France was espoused, with different degrees of fervour, by all lovers of civil and religious freedom.  To the Whigs the humiliation of Pitt was a more cherished object than the defeat of Napoleon.  Fox wrote to a friend:  “The triumph of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise;” and I have gathered that this was the prevalent temper of Whiggery during the long and desperate struggle with Republican and Imperial France.  What Byron called “The crowning carnage, Waterloo,” brought no abatement of political rancour.  The question of France, indeed, was eliminated from the contest, but its elimination enabled English Liberals to concentrate their hostility on the Tory Government without incurring the reproach of unpatriotic sympathy with the enemies of England.

In the great fight between Tory and Whig, Government and Opposition, Authority and Freedom, there was no quarter.  Neither age nor sex was spared.  No department of national life was untouched by the fury of the contest.  The Royal Family was divided.  The Duke of Cumberland was one of the most dogged and unscrupulous leaders of the Tory party; the Duke of Sussex toasted the memory of Charles James Fox, and at a public dinner joined in singing “The Trumpet of Liberty,” of which the chorus ran—­

    “Fall, tyrants, fall! 
    These are the days of liberty;
    Fall, tyrants, fall!”