uencing the Government they hated save by sheer
violence. They came therefore to the front with their old national and
religious bigotry, their long-nursed dislike of the Hanoverian Court,
their long-nursed habits of violence and faction, their long-nursed
hatred of Parliament, but with no means of expressing them save riot and
uproar.

[Sidenote: Wilkes.]

It was this temper of the masses which was seized and turned to his
purpose by John Wilkes. Wilkes was a worthless profligate; but he had a
remarkable faculty of enlisting popular sympathy on his side; and by a
singular irony of fortune he became in the end the chief instrument in
bringing about three of the greatest advances which our Constitution has
made. He woke the nation to a sense of the need for Parliamentary reform
by his defence of the rights of constituencies against the despotism of
the House of Commons. He took the lead in a struggle which put an end to
the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings. He was the first to establish
the right of the press to discuss public affairs. But in his attack upon
the Ministry of Lord Bute he served simply as an organ of the general
excitement and discontent. The bulk of the Tories were on fire to
gratify their old grudge against the Crown and its Ministers. The body
of the Whigs, and the commercial classes who backed them, were startled
and angered by the dismissal of Pitt, and by the revolt of the Crown
against the Whig system. The nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at
the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a
coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its
sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and
disturbances which culminated--in a rough spirit of punning upon the
name of the minister--in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The
journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for
this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the _North-Briton_ that
Wilkes took a lead in the movement by denouncing the Cabinet and the
peace with peculiar bitterness, by playing on the popular jealousy of
foreigners and Scotchmen, and by venturing to denounce the hated
minister by name.

[Sidenote: Bute's fall.]

Ignorant and brutal as was the movement which Wilkes headed, it was a
revival of public opinion; and though the time was to come when the
influence of opinion would be exercised more wisely, even now it told
for good. It was the a