enthusiast had figured to himself that millennium according to the fashion of his own wishes.  The republican expected that the power of the Crown would be reduced to a mere shadow, the high Tory that the Stuarts would be restored, the moderate Tory that the golden days which the Church and the landed interest had enjoyed during the last years of Queen Anne would immediately return.  It would have been impossible to satisfy everybody.  The conquerors satisfied nobody.

We have no reverence for the memory of those who were then called the patriots.  We are for the principles of good government against Walpole,—­and for Walpole against the Opposition.  It was most desirable that a purer system should be introduced; but, if the old system was to be retained, no man was so fit as Walpole to be at the head of affairs.  There were grievous abuses in the Government, abuses more than sufficient to justify a strong Opposition.  But the party opposed to Walpole, while they stimulated the popular fury to the highest point, were at no pains to direct it aright.  Indeed they studiously misdirected it.  They misrepresented the evil.  They prescribed inefficient and pernicious remedies.  They held up a single man as the sole cause of all the vices of a bad system which had been in full operation before his entrance into public life, and which continued to be in full operation when some of these very brawlers had succeeded to his power.  They thwarted his best measures.  They drove him into an unjustifiable war against his will.  Constantly talking in magnificent language about tyranny, corruption, wicked ministers, servile courtiers, the liberty of Englishmen, the Great Charter, the rights for which our fathers bled, Timoleon, Brutus, Hampden, Sydney, they had absolutely nothing to propose which would have been an improvement on our institutions.  Instead of directing the public mind to definite reforms which might have completed the work of the revolution, which might have brought the legislature into harmony with the nation, and which might have prevented the Crown from doing by influence what it could no longer do by prerogative, they excited a vague craving for change, by which they profited for a single moment, and of which, as they well deserved, they were soon the victims.

Among the reforms which the State then required, there were two of paramount importance, two which would alone have remedied almost every gross abuse, and without which all other remedies would have been unavailing, the publicity of parliamentary proceedings, and the abolition of the rotten boroughs.  Neither of these was thought of.  It seems us clear that, if these were not adopted, all other measures would have been illusory.  Some of the patriots suggested changes which would, beyond all doubt, have increased the existing evils a hundredfold.  These men wished to transfer the disposal of employments and the command of the army from the Crown to the Parliament; and this on the very ground that the Parliament had long been a grossly corrupt body.  The security against malpractices was to be that the members, instead of having a portion of the public plunder doled out to them by a minister, were to help themselves.