A by-election was impending in Yorkshire, and Pitt, paying a social visit to the famous Mrs. B.—­one of the Whig Queens of the West Riding—­said, banteringly, “Well, the election is all right for us.  Ten thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire to-night by a sure hand.”  “The devil they do!” responded Mrs. B., and that night the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the Great North Road, and the ten thousand guineas were used to procure the return of the Whig candidate.  The electioneering methods, less adventurous but not more scrupulous, of a rather later day have been depicted in Pickwick, and Coningsby, and My Novel, and Middlemarch, with all the suggestive fun of a painting by Hogarth.

And so, with startling incidents and culpable expedients and varying fortunes, the great struggle for political freedom was conducted through the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it has been my interesting fortune to know some of the toughest of the combatants both among the leaders and in the rank-and-file.  And from all of them alike—­and not only from them, but from all who remembered the time—­I have gathered the impression that all through their earlier life the hidden fires of revolution were smouldering under English society, and that again and again an actual outbreak was only averted by some happy stroke of fortune.  At the Election of 1868 an old labourer in the agricultural Borough of Woodstock told a Liberal canvasser from Oxford that in his youth arms had been stored in his father’s cottage so as to be in readiness for the outbreak which was to take place if Lord Grey’s Reform Bill was finally defeated.  A Whig nobleman, of great experience and calm judgment, told me that if Princess Victoria had died before William IV., and thereby Ernest Duke of Cumberland had succeeded to the Throne, no earthly power could have averted a revolution.  “I have no hesitation in saying,” I heard Mr. Gladstone say, “that if the repeal of the Corn Laws had been defeated, or even retarded, we should have had a revolution.”  Charles Kingsley and his fellow-workers for Social Reform expected a revolution in April 1848.

But, after all, these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture.  Let me close this chapter by a narrative of fact, derived from the late Lord de Ros, who was an eye-witness of the events which he narrated.  Arthur Thistlewood (whose execution for the “Cato Street Conspiracy” I have described in a previous chapter) was a young Englishman who had been in Paris in the time of Robespierre’s ascendency, and had there imbibed revolutionary sentiments.  He served for a short time as an officer in the English Army, and after quitting the service he made himself notorious by trying to organize a political riot in London, for which he was tried and acquitted.  He subsequently collected round him a secret society of disaffected citizens, and proceeded to arrange a plan by which he hoped to paralyze Government and establish a Reign of Terror in London.