l events they would have
convulsed England, for the sake of bringing them back. These men
constituted what would now be called in the language of French politics
the Extreme Right of the Tory party; they would become of importance at
any hour when some actual movement was made from the outside to restore
the Stuarts. Such a movement would of course have carried with it and
with them the great bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the
mean time, and until some such movement was made, the Jacobite section
of the Tories was not in a condition to be active or influential, and
was not a serious difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.

The Whigs had great advantages on their side. They had a clear
principle to start with. The constitutional errors and excesses of the
Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or
three main principles of civil and religious liberty. The Whigs knew
what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the
Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories
set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land. The
uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the
{20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes. Many a
Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his own
again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they, had
in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion
end in a Stuart restoration. But, on the other hand, the Whigs could
strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in
Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country
into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing their projects melt
away into visions and chimeras. A great band of landed proprietors
formed the leaders of the Whigs. Times have changed since then, and
the representatives of some of those great houses which then led the
Whig party have passed or glided insensibly into the ranks of the
Tories; but the main reason for this is because a Tory of our day
represents fairly enough, in certain political aspects, the Whig of the
days of Queen Anne. What is called in American politics a new
departure has taken place in England since that time; the Radical party
has come into existence with political principles and watchwords quite
different even from those of the early Whigs. Some of the Whig houses,
no