the sense of this popular feeling which encouraged the
king to exert his personal influence to defeat the measure in the
Lords, and on its defeat to order his Ministers to deliver up the seals.
The unpopularity of Shelburne stood in the way of his resumption of
office, and in December 1783 Pitt accepted the post of First Lord of the
Treasury. His position would at once have been untenable had the country
gone with its nominal representatives. He was defeated again and again
by large majorities in the Commons; but the majorities dwindled as a
shower of addresses from every quarter, from the Tory University of
Oxford as from the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public
opinion went with the Minister and not with the House. It was the
general sense of this that justified Pitt in the firmness with which, in
the teeth of addresses for his removal from office, he delayed the
dissolution of Parliament for five months, and gained time for that
ripening of the national sentiment on which he counted for success. When
the election of 1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public
feeling took a strength which broke through the corrupt influences that
commonly governed its representation. Every great constituency, the
counties and the large towns, returned supporters of Pitt. Of the
majority which had defeated him in the Commons, a hundred and sixty
members were unseated. Fox hardly retained his seat for Westminster,
Burke lost his seat for Bristol, and only a fragment of the Whig party
was saved by its command of nomination boroughs.

[Sidenote: Pitt's temper.]

When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the
Minister of twenty-five was master of England as no Minister had been
before. Even George the Third yielded to his sway, partly through
gratitude for the triumph he had won for him, partly from a sense of the
madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a gradual
discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political rivals
had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation at
large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a
policy; while the Tories, whom the Coalition had disgusted with Lord
North, as it had estranged Fox from their opponents, clung to the
Minister who had "saved the king." But it was the support of a new
political power that really gave his strength to the young Minister. The
sudden rise of English industry