aplain being always
provided for, after a few years' attendance, by a request of the House
to the crown. To complete this accumulation of good things, the Speaker
who exhibits intelligence, is frequently promoted to the higher offices
of the cabinet, and generally receives a peerage.

But those were the "piping times of peace;" times of trouble and terror
were at hand. The French democracy had already burst on Europe; and
every throne was heaving on the surge which it had raised. Pitt alone,
of all the great ministers of Europe, seemed to disregard its hazards.
Customary as it is for the pamphleteers of later times to assail his
memory, as the promoter of hostilities, the chief outcry against Pitt in
the year 1790, was his tardiness in thinking that those hostilities
could ever force England to take a share in the struggles of the
Continent. The whole aristocracy, the whole property, the whole
mercantile interest, and even the whole moral feeling of the empire, had
become from hour to hour more convinced that a war was inevitable. Even
the Opposition, whose office it was to screen the atrocities of every
national enemy, and who, for a time, had looked to Jacobinism as an
auxiliary in the march to power, had at last shrunk from this horrible
alliance--had felt the natural disgust of Englishmen for an association
with the undisguised vice and vileness of the Republic, and had at last
sunk into silence, if not into shame. Burke had published his immortal
"Reflections," and their sound had gone forth like the tolling of a vast
funeral bell for the obsequies of European monarchy. Still, nothing
could move Pitt. By nature, a financier, and by genius the most
magnificent of all financiers, he calculated the force of nations by the
depths of their treasuries; and seeing France bankrupt, conceived that
she was on the verge of conviction, and waited only to see her sending
her humbled Assembly to beg for a general loan, and for a general peace
at the same moment.

But those were days made to show the shortsightedness of human sagacity.
The lesson was rapidly given; it was proved in European havoc, that
utter powerlessness for good was not merely compatible with tremendous
power for evil, but was actually the means of accumulating that power;
that the more wretched, famishing, and haggard a nation might become at
home, the more irresistible it might prove abroad: that, like the
madman, it might be fevered and tortured by mental d