at difficulty was removed. There was no
longer a vision--such as Gillray had embodied in his caricatures--of a
guillotine in St. James's Street: or of a Committee of Public Safety
formed by Fox, Paine, and Horne Tooke. Meanwhile Whig prophecies of the
failure of the war were not disproved by its results. Though the English
navy had been victorious, English interference on the Continent had been
futile. Millions of money had been wasted: and millions were flowing
freely. Even now we stand astonished at the reckless profusion of the
financiers of the time. And what was there to show for it? The French
empire, so far from being destroyed, had been consolidated. If we
escaped for the time, could we permanently resist the whole power of
Europe? When the Peninsular War began we had been fighting, except for
the short truce of Amiens, for sixteen years; and there seemed no reason
to believe that the expedition to Portugal in 1808 would succeed better
than previous efforts. The Walcheren expedition of 1809 was a fresh
proof of our capacity for blundering. Pauperism was still increasing
rapidly, and forebodings of a war with America beginning to trouble men
interested in commerce. The English Opposition had ample texts for
discourses; and a demand for change began to spring up which was no
longer a reflection of foreign sympathies. An article in the _Edinburgh_
of January 1808, which professed to demonstrate the hopelessness of the
Peninsular War, roused the wrath of the Tories. The _Quarterly Review_
was started by Canning and Scott, and the _Edinburgh_, in return, took a
more decidedly Whig colour. The Radicals now showed themselves behind
the Whigs. Cobbett, who had been the most vigorous of John Bull
Anti-Jacobins, was driven by his hatred of the tax-gatherer and the
misery of the agricultural labourers into the opposite camp, and his
_Register_ became the most effective organ of Radicalism. Demands for
reform began again to make themselves heard in parliament. Sir Francis
Burdett, who had sat at the feet of Horne Tooke, and whose return with
Cochrane for Westminster in 1807 was the first parliamentary triumph of
the reformers, proposed a motion on 15th June 1809, which was, of
course, rejected, but which was the first of a series, and marked the
revival of a serious agitation not to cease till the triumph of 1832.

Meanwhile Bentham, meditating profoundly upon the Panopticon, had at
last found out that he had begun at the wr