had not been sufficient to reclaim a guilty
world; and a second and more severe chastisement was at hand. Others
muttered that the event which all good men lamented was to be ascribed
to unprincipled ambition. It would indeed have been strange if, in that
age, so important a death, happening at so critical a moment, had not
been imputed to poison. The father of the deceased Prince loudly accused
the Court of Vienna; and the imputation, though not supported by the
slightest evidence, was, during some time, believed by the vulgar.

The politicians at the Dutch embassy imagined that now at length the
parliament would listen to reason. It seemed that even the country
gentlemen must begin to contemplate the probability of an alarming
crisis. The merchants of the Royal Exchange, much better acquainted than
the country gentlemen with foreign lands, and much more accustomed than
the country gentlemen to take large views, were in great agitation.
Nobody could mistake the beat of that wonderful pulse which had recently
begun, and has during five generations continued, to indicate the
variations of the body politic. When Littleton was chosen speaker, the
stocks rose. When it was resolved that the army should be reduced to
seven thousand men, the stocks fell. When the death of the Electoral
Prince was known, they fell still lower. The subscriptions to a new
loan, which the Commons had, from mere spite to Montague, determined to
raise on conditions of which he disapproved, came in very slowly. The
signs of a reaction of feeling were discernible both in and out of
Parliament. Many men are alarmists by constitution. Trenchard and Howe
had frightened most men by writing and talking about the danger to which
liberty and property would be exposed if the government were allowed to
keep a large body of Janissaries in pay. The danger had ceased to exist;
and those people who must always be afraid of something, as they could
no longer be afraid of a standing army, began to be afraid of the French
King. There was a turn in the tide of public opinion; and no part of
statesmanship is more important than the art of taking the tide of
public opinion at the turn. On more than one occasion William showed
himself a master of that art. But, on the present occasion, a sentiment,
in itself amiable and respectable, led him to commit the greatest
mistake of his whole life. Had he at this conjuncture again earnestly
pressed on the Houses the importance of