had not only destroyed political freedom, but also social welfare, and had “crushed everything respectable and virtuous in the nation.”  What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand, the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate, our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England.  Burke forced us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said in a letter to the present writer) “almost unmade the liberties, the Constitution, even the material interests and prosperity, of our country.”  Patriots like William Cobbett and Sydney Smith, though absolutely convinced that the war was just and necessary, doubted if England could ever rally from the immense strain which it had imposed on her resources, or regain the freedom which, in order to beat France, she had so lightly surrendered.

At a time when Manchester was unrepresented and Gatton sent two Members to Parliament, it was steadily maintained by lovers of the established order that the proposed enlargement of the electorate was “incompatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligation.”  If it were carried, religion, morality, and property would perish together, and our venerable Constitution would topple down in ruins.  “A thousand years have scarce sufficed to make England what she is:  one hour may lay her in the dust.”  In 1861 J. W. Croker wrote to his patron, the great borough-monger Lord Hertford:  “There can be no doubt that the Reform Bill is a stepping-stone in England to a republic, and in Ireland to separation.  Both may happen without the Bill, but with it they are inevitable.”  Next year the Bill became law.  Lord Bathurst cut off his pigtail, exclaiming:  “Ichabod, for the glory is departed”—­an exquisitely significant combination of act and word—­and the Duke of Wellington announced that England had accomplished “a revolution by due course of law.”  In some sense the words were true.  Political power had passed from the aristocracy to the middle class.  The English equivalents of Talleyrand—­the men who directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—­were filled with the wildest alarms.  Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded than the other.

Sixteen years passed.  Property and freedom seemed pretty secure.  Even privilege, though shaken, had not been overthrown; and a generation had grown up to which the fears of revolution seemed fantastic.  Then suddenly came the uprising of the nations in ’48; and once again “dissolving throes” were felt, with pain or joy according to the temperament of those who felt them.  “We have seen,” said Charles Greville, “such a stirring-up of all the elements of society as nobody ever dreamt of; we have seen a general saturnalia—­ignorance,