a crown of Laurel. C. Fox follow'd him in a Landau & 6 Horses
cover'd in Favors & Lawrels. The appearance this Procession made was
equal in splendor to the public Entry of an Ambassador."

A by-election was impending in Yorkshire, and Pitt, paying a social
visit to the famous Mrs. B.--one of the Whig Queens of the West
Riding--said, banteringly, "Well, the election is all right for us. Ten
thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire to-night
by a sure hand." "The devil they do!" responded Mrs. B., and that night
the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the
Great North Road, and the ten thousand guineas were used to procure the
return of the Whig candidate. The electioneering methods, less
adventurous but not more scrupulous, of a rather later day have been
depicted in _Pickwick_, and _Coningsby_, and _My Novel_, and
_Middlemarch_, with all the suggestive fun of a painting by Hogarth.

And so, with startling incidents and culpable expedients and varying
fortunes, the great struggle for political freedom was conducted through
the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it has been my
interesting fortune to know some of the toughest of the combatants both
among the leaders and in the rank-and-file. And from all of them
alike--and not only from them, but from all who remembered the time--I
have gathered the impression that all through their earlier life the
hidden fires of revolution were smouldering under English society, and
that again and again an actual outbreak was only averted by some happy
stroke of fortune. At the Election of 1868 an old labourer in the
agricultural Borough of Woodstock told a Liberal canvasser from Oxford
that in his youth arms had been stored in his father's cottage so as to
be in readiness for the outbreak which was to take place if Lord Grey's
Reform Bill was finally defeated. A Whig nobleman, of great experience
and calm judgment, told me that if Princess Victoria had died before
William IV., and thereby Ernest Duke of Cumberland had succeeded to the
Throne, no earthly power could have averted a revolution. "I have no
hesitation in saying," I heard Mr. Gladstone say, "that if the repeal of
the Corn Laws had been defeated, or even retarded, we should have had a
revolution." Charles Kingsley and his fellow-workers for Social Reform
expected a revolution in April 1848.

But, after all, these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture.
Let