will showed its old
power to destroy; but it remained impotent to create any new system of
administrative action. It could aid one clique of Whigs to destroy
another clique of Whigs, but it could do nothing to interrupt the
general course of Whig administration. Walpole and Pelham were alike the
representatives of a minority of the nation; but the minority which they
represented knew its mind and how to carry out its mind, while the
majority of the people remained helpless and distracted between their
hatred of the House of Hanover and their dread of the consequences which
would follow on a return of the Stuarts.

[Sidenote: Parliament and the nation.]

The results of such a divorce between the government and that general
mass of national sentiment on which a government can alone safely ground
itself at once made themselves felt. Robbed as it was of all practical
power, and thus stripped of the feeling of responsibility which the
consciousness of power carries with it, among the mass of Englishmen
public opinion became ignorant and indifferent to the general progress
of the age, but at the same time violent and mutinous, hostile to
Government because it was Government, disloyal to the Crown, averse from
Parliament. For the first and last time in our history Parliament was
unpopular, and its opponents secure of popularity. But the results on
the governing class were even more fatal to any right conduct of public
affairs. Not only had the mass of national sentiment been so utterly
estranged from Parliament by the withdrawal of the Tories that the
people had lost all trust in it as an expression of their will, but the
Parliament did not pretend to express it. It was conscious that for
half-a-century it had not been really a representative of the nation,
that it had represented a minority, wiser no doubt than their
fellow-countrymen, but still a minority of Englishmen. At the same time
it saw, and saw with a just pride, that its policy had as a whole been
for the nation's good, that it had given political and religious freedom
to the people in the very teeth of their political and religious
bigotry, that in spite of their narrow insularism it had made Britain
the greatest of European powers. The sense of both these aspects of
Parliament had sunk in fact so deeply into the mind of the Whigs as to
become a theory of Parliamentary government. They were never weary of
expressing their contempt for public opinion. They shrank