activity of the public mind had ceased,
and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great
middle class, which no longer found its representatives in the
legislature. "You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt
sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of
Commons." It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into
power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him
with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. "For weeks,"
laughs Horace Walpole, "it rained gold boxes." London stood by him
through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English
merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political
lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its
energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its
moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural
attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish,
whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection
for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their
enthusiastic reverence, and for the reverence which his country has
borne Pitt ever since. He loved England with an intense and personal
love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till
England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought
of self or party-spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the factions who
rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but the public! I set
you the example!" His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he
held England. But even the faults which chequered his character told for
him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had
been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence
of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in
the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in
full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was,
are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day
to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance
which he made on great debates with his limbs sw