octrine, that an impeachment is not terminated by a dissolution. In the
course of the same year the two great rivals contended side by side in
a far more important cause. They are fairly entitled to divide the high
honour of having added to our statute-book the inestimable law which
places the liberty of the press under the protection of juries. On
one occasion, and one alone, Pitt, during the first half of his long
administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an enlightened Whig. In
the debate on the Test Act, he stooped to gratify the master whom he
served, the university which he represented, and the great body of
clergymen and country gentlemen on whose support he rested, by talking,
with little heartiness, indeed, and with no asperity, the language of
a Tory. With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to
the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and religious
liberty.

Nor did anything, during that period, indicate that he loved war, or
harboured any malevolent feeling against any neighbouring nation. Those
French writers who have represented him as a Hannibal sworn in childhood
by his father to bear eternal hatred to France, as having by mysterious
intrigues and lavish bribes, instigated the leading Jacobins to commit
those excesses which dishonoured the Revolution, as having been the real
author of the first coalition, know nothing of his character or of his
history. So far was he from being a deadly enemy to France, that his
laudable attempts to bring about a closer connection with that country
by means of a wise and liberal treaty of commerce brought on him the
severe censure of the opposition. He was told in the House of Commons
that he was a degenerate son, and that his partiality for the hereditary
foes of our island was enough to make his great father's bones stir
under the pavement of the Abbey.

And this man, whose name, if he had been so fortunate as to die in
1792, would now have been associated with peace, with freedom, with
philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and constitutional
administration, lived to associate his name with arbitrary government,
with harsh laws harshly executed, with alien bills, with gagging bills,
with suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, with cruel punishments
inflicted on some political agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions
instituted against others, and with the most costly and most sanguinary
wars of modern times. He lived to