e sovereign.

This was the result of what I insist on tediously, but what is most
necessary to insist on, for it is a cardinal particular in the whole
topic. Many of the English people--the higher and more educated
portion--had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional
government, but the mass did not comprehend it. They looked to the
sovereign as the Government, and to the sovereign only. These were
carried forward by the magic of the aristocracy and principally by the
influence of the great Whig families with their adjuncts. Without that
aid reason or liberty would never have held them.

Though the rule of Parliament was definitely established in 1688, yet
the mode of exercising that rule has since changed. At first Parliament
did not know how to exercise it; the organisation of parties and the
appointment of Cabinets by parties grew up in the manner Macaulay has
described so well. Up to the latest period the sovereign was supposed,
to a most mischievous extent, to interfere in the choice of the persons
to be Ministers. When George III. finally became insane, in 1810, every
one believed that George IV., on assuming power as Prince Regent, would
turn out Mr. Perceval's Government and empower Lord Grey or Lord
Grenville, the Whig leaders, to form another. The Tory Ministry was
carrying on a successful war--a war of existence--against Napoleon; but
in the people's minds, the necessity at such an occasion for an
unchanged Government did not outweigh the fancy that George IV. was a
Whig. And a Whig it is true he had been before the French Revolution,
when he lived an indescribable life in St. James's Street with Mr. Fox.
But Lord Grey and Lord Grenville were rigid men, and had no immoral
sort of influence. What liberalism of opinion the Regent ever had was
frightened out of him (as of other people) by the Reign of Terror. He
felt, according to the saying of another monarch, that "he lived by
being a royalist". It soon appeared that he was most anxious to retain
Mr. Perceval, and that he was most eager to quarrel with the Whig
Lords. As we all know, he kept the Ministry whom he found in office;
but that it should have been thought he could then change them, is a
significant example how exceedingly modern our notions of the despotic
action of Parliament in fact are.

By the steps of the struggle thus rudely mentioned (and by others which
I have no room to speak of, nor need I), the change which in the Greek
cities w