though 'the wholesome
days of England were numbered,' and we are on the 'verge of the most
dreadful of all calamities'--a civil war.

Jeffrey has learned from Hume that all government is ultimately
founded upon opinion. The great thing is to make the action of public
opinion regular and constituted. The whole machinery of the
constitution, he says, is for the express purpose of 'preventing the
kingly power from dashing itself to pieces against the more radical
power of the people.'[149] The merit of a representative body is not
to be tested simply by the goodness of its legislation, but by its
diminishing the intensity of the struggle for the supreme power.
Jeffrey in fact is above all preoccupied with the danger of
revolution. The popular will is, in fact, supreme; repression may
force it into explosion; but by judicious management it may be tamed
and tempered. Then we need above all things that it should, as he says
in his reply to Mill (December 1826), give their 'natural and
wholesome influence to wealth and rank.' The stability of the English
Constitution depends, as he said in 1810, upon the monarchy and
aristocracy, and their stability on their being the natural growth of
ages and having 'struck their roots deep into every stratum of the
political soil.'

The Whigs represent the view implied in Macaulay's attack upon
Mill--the view of cultivated men of sense, with their eyes open to
many difficulties overlooked by zealots, but far too sceptical and
despondent to rouse any enthusiasm or accept any dogmas absolutely. By
the time of the Reform Bill the danger was obviously on the side of
dogged obstructionism, and then the 'middle party,' as Jeffrey calls
it, inclined towards the Radical side and begged them to join its
ranks and abandon the attempt to realise extreme views. They could
also take credit as moderate men do for having all along been in the
right. But to both extremes, as Jeffrey pathetically complains, they
appeared to be mere trimmers.[150]

The Utilitarian held the Whig to be a 'trimmer'; the Whig thought the
Utilitarian a fanatic; they agreed in holding that the Tory was simply
stupid. And yet, when we look at the Tory creed, we shall find that
both Whig and Utilitarian overlooked some very vital problems. The
Tories of course represent the advocates of strong government; and, as
their opponents held, had no theories--only prejudices. The first
article of the creed of an Eldon or a Sidmouth was,