t many, have gone with the forward movement; some have remained
behind, and so lapsed almost insensibly into the Tory quarter. But at
the close of Queen Anne's reign all the great leading Whigs stood well
together. They understood better than the Tories did the necessity of
obtaining superior influence in the House of Commons. They even
contrived at that time to secure the majority of the county
constituencies, while they had naturally the majority of the commercial
class on their side. Then, as in later days, the vast wealth of the
Whig families was spent unstintingly, and it may be said unblushingly,
in securing the possession of the small constituencies, the
constituencies which were only to be had by liberal bribery. Then, as
afterwards, there was perceptible in the Whig party a strange
combination of dignity and of meanness, of great principles and of
somewhat degraded practices. They had high {21} purposes; they
recognized noble principles, and they held to them; they were for
political liberty as they then understood it, and they were for
religious equality--for such approach at least to religious equality as
had then come to be sanctioned by responsible politicians in England.
They were ready to make great sacrifices in defence of their political
creed. But the principles and purposes with which they started, and to
which they kept, did not succeed in purifying and ennobling all their
parliamentary strategy and political conduct. They intrigued, they
bribed, they bought, they cajoled, they paltered, they threatened, they
made unsparing use of money and of power, they employed every art to
carry out high and national purposes which the most unscrupulous cabal
could have used to secure the attainment of selfish and ignoble ends.
Their enemies had put one great advantage into their hands. The
conduct of Bolingbroke and of Oxford during recent years had left the
Whigs the sole representatives of constitutional liberty.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anarchy or "Perkin"]

The two great political parties hated and denounced each other with a
ferocity hardly known before, and hardly possible in our later times.
The Whigs vituperated the Tories as rebels and traitors; the Tories
cried out against the Whigs as the enemies of religion and the
opponents of "the true Church of England." Many a ballad of that time
described the Whigs as men whose object it was to destroy both mitre
and crown, to introduce anarchy once again, a