the defeat of Prestonpans;
with Scotch ascendency and revenge for the blood shed at Carlisle; with
breechless Highlanders and Protestant confiscation. Thus the Tories, as a
popular party, capable of exercising any effective control on the vices
and corruptions of administration, were practically extinct. Meanwhile,
the popular party in England, steeped in corruption, and gorged with the
spoils of the state, which the expensive system of government, introduced
with the Revolution, had done so much to augment, was effectually gagged,
and was enjoying its lucrative abuses in silence. This is the true
explanation and real cause of the prodigious corruptions which pervaded
every department of the state, and--what was worse--every class in the
country during the seventy years which followed the Revolution, and which
had wellnigh proved fatal to all patriotic spirit, or public virtue in
England. The two powers, that of the government and the people, usually
opposing each other, had come to draw in the same direction, and they
raised between them a spring-tide of corruption, which wellnigh submerged
the state.

There can be no question, that if this degrading system of government--the
necessary and never-failing result of successful revolution--had continued
for a generation longer, it would have proved altogether fatal to Great
Britain. But, fortunately for the country, George III. and his advisers,
from the very first moment of his accession to the throne, set his face
against the party which had introduced and matured this system of
government; and their efforts, though after a severe struggle, were
successful. This was the turning-point of English history; upon the
success of that attempt, the future character of the government and of the
people mainly depended. It, for the first time since the Revolution,
restored the government to its proper position--it rested it, in its
ultimate effects, on property, and put numbers in opposition. This is the
only proper basis of good government--for without property ruling, there
can be no stability in administration; and without numbers watching, there
is no security against the multiplication of abuses. The corrupt system of
Sir R. Walpole, and the preceding administrations, had arisen from the
popular party--that is, numbers--having become the ruling power, and of
course appropriated to themselves the whole spoils of the state. Instantly
their watching became equal to nothing, and e