On the top of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war.  The peace did its work:  it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time.  And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things higher than ribbon or place or pension, seemed to be dead among public men.  The Tories, long deprived of power, and discredited by the taint or suspicion of Jacobitism, counted for nothing.  The Whigs, agreed on all points of principle, and split into sections, the Ins and Outs, solely by the fact that all could not enjoy places and pensions at once, the supply being unequal to the demand—­had come to regard politics as purely a game; a kind of licensed hazard played for titles, orders, and emoluments, by certain families who had the entree to the public table by virtue of the part they had played in settling the succession.

Into the midst of this state of things, this world of despondency, mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years’ War—­and particularly the loss of Minorca—­seemed to confirm the gloomiest prognostications of the most hopeless pessimists, came William Pitt; and in eighteen months changed the face of the world, not for his generation only, but for ours.  Indifferent as an administrator, mediocre as a financier, passionate, haughty, headstrong, with many of the worst faults of an orator, he was still a man with ideals—­a patriot among placemen, pure where all were corrupt.  And the effect of his touch was magical.  By infusing his own spirit, his own patriotism, his own belief in his country, and his own belief in himself, into those who worked with him—­ay, and into the better half of England—­he wrought a seeming miracle.

See, for instance, what Mr. Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann in September, 1757.  ‘For how many years,’ he says, ’have I been telling you that your country was mad, that your country was undone!  It does not grow wiser, it does not grow more prosperous! ...  How do you behave on these lamentable occasions?  Oh, believe me, it is comfortable to have an island to hide one’s head in! ...’  Again he writes in the same month,’ ’It is time for England to slip her own cables, and float away into some unknown ocean.’