Parliamentary government that has ever existed." His administration may
be regarded as a fresh starting-point in the history of the country, as
the inauguration of the principle of steady amendment, improvement, and
progress, in place of the maxims which had guided all his predecessors
since the Revolution, of regarding every thing as permanently settled by
the arrangements made at that time, and their own duty, consequently, as
binding them to keep everything in its existing condition. But, of all
the ministers recorded in our annals, there is not one so greatly in
advance of his time as Pitt; and from the very outset of his ministerial
career he applied himself, not only to the removal or correction of
admitted abuses or defects, but, in cases where the fault, being in our
general system of policy, had been less conspicuous, to the
establishment of new principles of action which have been the rules of
all succeeding statesmen. He was not, indeed, the first raiser of the
question of Parliamentary Reform, but he was the first to produce an
elaborate scheme with that object, parts of which, such as the
suppression of the smaller boroughs and the enfranchisement of places
which had gradually become more important, have been leading features of
every subsequent bill on the subject. He was the first to propose the
removal of those political disabilities under which the Roman Catholics
labored, which no one before him had regarded as consistent with the
safety of the state, and to which he sacrificed office. He was the first
to conceive the idea of developing our national industries and resources
by commercial treaties with other nations, even choosing for his
essay-piece a treaty with a country with which our relations for nearly
five hundred years had been almost uninterruptedly hostile, and which
Fox, in the heat of his opposition, objected even to consider in any
other light than that of an enemy. He laid the foundation for all
subsequent legislation connected with our colonies in his Bill for the
Government of Canada; and he established a system for the government of
our Indian dependencies on so statesman-like a principle, that all
subsequent administrations concurred in upholding it, till subsequent
events compelled the abolition of all the share in the government of the
country previously possessed by the Company.

A great writer of the past generation,[109] who in some respects has
done full justice to his genius an