Portland at their head; and the rest had, after
many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to
the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of
friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he
tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of
Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public
life. Session followed session with scarcely a single division. In the
eventful year 1799, the largest minority that could be mustered against
the government was twenty-five.

In Pitt's domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no want of
vigour. While he offered to French Jacobinism a resistance so feeble
that it only encouraged the evil which he wished to suppress, he put
down English Jacobinism with a strong hand. The Habeas Corpus Act
was repeatedly suspended. Public meetings were placed under severe
restraints. The government obtained from parliament power to send out
of the country aliens who were suspected of evil designs; and that power
was not suffered to be idle. Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to
monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without mercy. It
was hardly safe for a republican to avow his political creed over
his beefsteak and his bottle of port at a chop-house. The old laws of
Scotland against sedition, laws which were considered by Englishmen as
barbarous, and which a succession of governments had suffered to rust,
were now furbished up and sharpened anew. Men of cultivated minds and
polished manners were, for offences which at Westminster would have been
treated as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay.
Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose language was
intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting the government by
physical force, were indicted for high treason, and were saved from the
gallows only by the righteous verdicts of juries. This severity was at
the time loudly applauded by alarmists whom fear had made cruel, but
will be seen in a very different light by posterity. The truth is, that
the Englishmen who wished for a revolution were, even in number,
not formidable, and in everything but number, a faction utterly
contemptible, without arms, or funds, or plans, or organisation, or
leader. There can be no doubt that Pitt, strong as he was in the
support of the great body of the nation, might easily have repressed
the turbul