this great and lasting victory. The
answer is a melancholy one. Content with what had been achieved, the
nation seems at once to have abandoned all idea of any further moral or
intellectual progress. In private life the grossest ignorance and
debauchery were written upon our social habits, in the broadest and most
legible characters. In public life, we see chicanery in the law, apathy
in the Church, corruption in Parliament, brutality on the seat of
justice; trade burdened with a great variety of capricious restrictions;
the punishment of death multiplied with the most shocking indifference;
the state of prisons so dreadful, that imprisonment--which might be, and
in those days often was, the lot of the most innocent of mankind--became
in itself a tremendous punishment; the press virtually shackled;
education every where wanted, and no where to be found.

[1] "_Taille and the Gabelle_." Sully thus describes these
fertile sources of crime and misery:--"Taille, source
principale d'abus et de vexations de toute espece, sans sa
repartition et sa perception. Il est bien a souhaiter, mais pas
a esperer, qu'on change un jour en entier le fond de cette
partie des revenus. Je mets la Gabelle de niveau avec la
Taille. Je n'ai jamais rien trouve de si _bizarrement
tyrannique_ que de faire acheter a un particulier, plus de sel
qu'il n'en veut et n'en peut consommer, et de lui defendre
encore de revendre ce qu'il a de trop."

The laws that were passed resemble the edicts of a jealous, selfish, and
even vindictive oligarchy, rather than institutions adopted for the
common welfare, by the representatives of a free people. Turn to any of
the works which describe the manners of the age, from the works of
Richardson or Fielding, to the bitter satire of Churchill and the
melancholy remonstrances of Cowper, and you are struck with the
delineation of a state and manners, and a tone of feeling which, in the
present day, appears scarcely credible. "'Sdeath, madam, do you threaten
me with the law?" says Lovelace to the victim of his calculating and
sordid violence. Throughout the volumes of these great writers, the
features perpetually recur of insolence, corruption, violence, and
debauchery in the one class, and of servility and cunning in the other.
It is impossible for the worst quality of an aristocracy--nominally, to
be sure, subject to the restraint of the law, but practically, almost
wh