ir college classes.
The conversation happened very naturally to touch on party prospects,
for they were at the moment in the thick of a general election--the
famous election of 1784, so fatal to the Whigs, when near 160
supporters of the Coalition Ministry--"Fox's martyrs"--lost their
seats, and Pitt was sent back with an enormous majority behind him.
Parliament had been dissolved a fortnight before, and many of the
elections were already past; Burke himself had been returned for
Malton on his way north, but the battle was still raging; in
Westminster, where the Whig chief was himself fighting, it lasted a
month longer, and in many other constituencies the event was as yet
undecided. As far as returns had been made, however, things had gone
hard with the Whigs, and Burke was despondent. He had been some twenty
years in public life without his party being in power as many months,
and since the party seemed now doomed, as indeed it was, to twenty
years of opposition again, he turned to Lord Maitland and said, "Lord
Maitland, if you want to be in office, if you have any ambition or
wish to be successful in life, shake us off, give us up." But Smith
intervened, and with singular hopefulness ventured to prophesy that in
two years things would certainly come round again. "Why," replied
Burke, "I have already been in a minority nineteen years, and your two
years, Mr. Smith, will just make me twenty-one, and it will surely be
high time for me to be then in my majority."[329]

Smith's hearty remark implies his continued loyalty to the
Rockinghams, and shows that just as he two years before approved of
their separation from Lord Shelburne, which many Whig critics have
censured, so he now equally approved of their coalition with their old
adversary, Lord North, which Whig critics have censured more severely
still. But his sanguine forecast was far astray. Burke never again
returned to office, and the whole conversation reads strangely in the
light of subsequent events. Only a few years more and Burke had
himself shaken off his friends--from no view to power, it is
true--and the young nobleman to whom he gave the advice in jest was to
take the lead in avenging the desertion, and to denounce the pension
it was proposed to give him as the wages of apostasy. The French
Revolution, which drove Burke back to a more conservative position,
carried Lord Maitland, who had drunk in Radicalism from Professor John
Millar, forward into the rep