lt to find a foreign than a home secretary,
Pitt recommended that Grenville should be transferred to the foreign
department, that Cornwallis should take Grenville's place, and that,
until Cornwallis returned from India, Dundas should have the seals, and
further suggested that Lord Hawkesbury (Jenkinson), then president of
the board of trade, should be called to the cabinet. George agreed, but
as Cornwallis declined the offer Dundas remained home secretary. Pitt
learnt that Ochakov was not so important as he at first imagined; indeed
the possession of it by the Turks would not have rendered Constantinople
safe from attack nor protected Poland from further partition. His
failure, however, to carry out his scheme of coercing Russia was a
serious matter; it destroyed his hopes of an extension of the defensive
alliance, and the triple alliance itself, on which his foreign policy
had been built, virtually came to an end. Frederick William was deeply
annoyed and, in order to strengthen his position with regard to Russia,
made advances to Austria, which led to an alliance between the two
powers and to their joint invasion of France.

The opinion of the great majority of the nation with regard to the
revolution in France was decided by the publication of Burke's
_Reflections on the French Revolution_ in November, 1790. This famous
work was primarily intended to rebut the assertions of Price and others
that the revolution in France was a more perfect development of the
ideas of the English revolution of 1688, that Englishmen had a right to
choose their own governors, cashier them for misconduct, and frame a
government for themselves. It describes the constitution as an
inheritance to be handed down to posterity uninjured and, if needs be,
improved, and exhibits and condemns the measures of the French assembly
as precipitate, unjust, and doomed to failure. Splendid alike as a
literary achievement and as a store-house of political wisdom, it is
also remarkable as a proof of Burke's prescience, for though he wrote at
an early stage of the revolution, before those savage excesses which
have made it a by-word, he foretold its future course, not indeed
without errors, but with wonderful sagacity. Superbly national in
sentiment, the book met the propaganda of French ideas by appealing to
the pride with which Englishmen regarded their own institutions. Its
success was immense. Paine answered it in his _Rights of Man_,
expressing revoluti