He caught
them in the alleys of Lombard Street, and clutched them from
the counting-houses of Cornhill. When Mr Pitt in an age of
bank restriction declared that every man with an estate of ten
thousand a-year had a right to be a peer, he sounded the knell
of "the cause for which Hampden had died on the field, and
Sydney on the scaffold."
In ordinary times the pupil of Shelburne would have raised
this country to a state of great material prosperity, and
removed or avoided many of those anomalies which now perplex
us; but he was not destined for ordinary times; and though his
capacity was vast and his spirit lofty, he had not that
passionate and creative genius required by an age of
revolution. The French outbreak was his evil daemon: he had
not the means of calculating its effects upon Europe. He had
but a meagre knowledge himself of continental politics: he was
assisted by a very inefficient diplomacy. His mind was lost
in a convulsion of which he neither could comprehend the
causes nor calculate the consequences; and forced to act, he
acted not only violently, but in exact opposition to the very
system he was called into political existence to combat; he
appealed to the fears, the prejudices, and the passions of a
privileged class, revived the old policy of the oligarchy he
had extinguished, and plunged into all the ruinous excesses of
French war and Dutch finance.
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