we
pass from the triumphs of the Seven Years' War to the miserable strife
of Whig factions with one another or of the whole Whig party with the
king. But wearisome as the story is, it is hardly less important than
that of the rise of England into a world-power. In the strife of these
wretched years began a political revolution which is still far from
having reached its close. Side by side with the gradual developement of
the English Empire and of the English race has gone on, through the
century that has passed since the close of the Seven Years' War, the
transfer of power within England itself from a governing class to the
nation as a whole. If the effort of George failed to restore the power
of the Crown, it broke the power which impeded the advance of the people
itself to political supremacy. Whilst labouring to convert the
aristocratic monarchy of which he found himself the head into a personal
sovereignty, the irony of fate doomed him to take the first step in an
organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a
democratic republic, ruled under monarchical forms.

[Sidenote: The Revolution and the nation.]

To realize however the true character of the king's attempt we must
recall for a moment the issue of the Revolution on which he claimed to
take his stand. It had no doubt given personal and religious liberty to
England at large. But its political benefits seemed as yet to be less
equally shared. The Parliament indeed had become supreme, and in theory
the Parliament was a representative of the whole English people. But in
actual fact the bulk of the English people found itself powerless to
control the course of English government. We have seen how at the very
moment of its triumph opinion had been paralyzed by the results of the
Revolution. The sentiment of the bulk of Englishmen remained Tory, but
the existence of a Stuart Pretender forced on them a system of
government which was practically Whig. Under William and Anne they had
tried to reconcile Toryism with the Revolution; but this effort ended
with the accession of the House of Hanover, and the bulk of the landed
classes and the clergy withdrew in a sulky despair from all permanent
contact with politics. Their hatred of the system to which they bowed
showed itself in the violence of their occasional outbreaks, in riots
over the Excise Bill, in cries for a Spanish war, in the frenzy against
Walpole. Whenever it roused itself, the national