remind them that we are not indebted
for this salutary prerogative to the forbearance of their party. Suppose
their Peerage Bill had passed into an Act, how would they have carried
the Reform Bill of 1832? The Whigs may reply, that if the Peerage Bill
had become a law, the Reform Bill would never have been introduced; and
I believe them. In that case, the British House of Lords would have been
transformed into a Venetian Senate, and the old walls of St. James's
might have witnessed scenes of as degrading mortification as the famous
ducal palace of the Adriatic.

George III. routed the Whigs, consolidated by half a century of power;
but an ordinary monarch would have sunk beneath the Coalition and
the India Bill. This scheme was the last desperate effort of the
oligarchical faction previous to 1830. Not that they were inactive
during the great interval that elapsed between the advent of Mr. Pitt
and the resurrection of Lord Grey: but, ever on the watch for a cry
to carry them into power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for the
chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in order to take the
throne by storm, that nothing was wanting but to hoist the tricolour and
to cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This fatal blunder clipped
the wings of Whiggism; nor is it possible to conceive a party that had
effected so many revolutions and governed a great country for so long
a period, more broken, sunk, and shattered, more desolate and
disheartened, than these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris. From that
period till 1830, the tactics of the Whigs consisted in gently and
gradually extricating themselves from their false position as the
disciples of Jacobinism, and assuming their ancient post as the
hereditary guardians of an hereditary monarchy. To make the transition
less difficult than it threatened, they invented Liberalism, a bridge
by which they were to regain the lost mainland, and daintily recross
on tiptoe the chasm over which they had originally sprung with so
much precipitation. A dozen years of 'liberal principles' broke up the
national party of England, cemented by half a century of prosperity
and glory, compared with which all the annals of the realm are dim and
lack-lustre. Yet so weak intrinsically was the oligarchical faction,
that their chief, despairing to obtain a monopoly of power for his
party, elaborately announced himself as the champion of his patrician
order, and attempted to coalesce with the l