olitical influence. But such
a pressure could only bring them into conflict with the Whigs whom the
fall of Lord North had recalled to office. Though the Tories had now
grown to a compact body of a hundred and fifty members, the Whigs still
remained superior to their rivals in numbers and ability as well as in
distinctness of political aim; for the return of the Bedford section to
the general body of the party, as well as its steady opposition to the
American war, had restored much of their early cohesion. But this
reunion only strengthened their aristocratic and exclusive tendencies,
and widened the breach which was steadily opening on questions such as
Parliamentary Reform between the bulk of the Whigs and the small
fragment of their party which remained true to the more popular
sympathies of Chatham.

[Sidenote: William Pitt.]

Lord Shelburne stood at the head of the Chatham party, and it was
reinforced at this moment by the entry into Parliament of the second and
youngest son of Chatham himself. William Pitt had hardly reached his
twenty-second year; but he left college with the learning of a ripe
scholar, and his ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by his
father's teaching. "He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said
a member to Charles Fox, the Whig leader in the Commons, after Pitt's
earliest speech in that house. "He is so already," replied Fox. Young as
he was, the haughty self-esteem of the new statesman breathed in every
movement of his tall, spare figure, in the hard lines of a countenance
which none but his closer friends saw lighted by a smile, in his cold
and repulsive address, his invariable gravity of demeanour, and his
habitual air of command. But none knew how great the qualities were
which lay beneath this haughty exterior; nor had any one guessed how
soon this "boy," as his rivals mockingly styled him, was to crush every
opponent and to hold England at his will. There was only a smile of
wonder when he refused any of the minor posts which were offered him in
the Rockingham administration, and the wonder passed into angry sarcasms
as soon as it was known that he claimed, if he took office at all, to be
at once admitted to the Cabinet. But Pitt had no desire to take office
under Rockingham. He was the inheritor of that side of his father's
policy which was most distasteful to the Whigs. To him as to Chatham the
main lesson of the war was the need of putting an end to those abuses