vements of the mechanic, the engineer, and the chemist; to the
labors of Brindley and Arkwright and Watts, to which, indeed, this great
expansion of the resources and growth of the wealth of the country is
principally owing.

While, as the preceding chapters of this work have been designed to
show, our political progress and advancement had been no less steady or
valuable; yet, important from a constitutional point of view as were
many of the labors of our legislators in these sixty years, they are
surpassed in their influence on the future history of the nation, as
well as in the reality and greatness of the changes which were produced
by them in the constitution, by the transactions of the reigns of the
next two sovereigns, though the two united scarcely equalled in their
duration a quarter of that of their venerable father.

It has been seen how Pitt was baffled in his efforts to remodel the
House of Commons, and to remove the disabilities under which the Roman
Catholics labored, the reasons for which, even granting that they had
been sufficient to justify their original imposition, had, in his
judgment, long passed away. His pursuit of the other great object of his
domestic policy, the emancipation of trade from the shackles which
impeded its universal development, was rudely interrupted by the
pressure of the war forced upon him by that very nation which he had
desired to make the first partner, if one may use such an expression, in
the prosperity which he hoped to diffuse by his commercial treaty with
her. But, as in the case of other men in advance of their age, the
principles which he had asserted were destined to bear fruit at a later
period. And the mere fact of a change in the person of the sovereign
seemed to make a change in the policy hitherto pursued less unnatural.

Yet, memorable as the reforms which it witnessed were destined to make
it, no reign ever commenced with more sinister omens than that at which
we have now arrived. The new King had not been on the throne a month,
when a conspiracy was discovered, surpassing in its treasonable atrocity
any that had been heard of in the kingdom since the days of the
Gunpowder Plot; and, even before those concerned in that foul crime had
been brought to punishment, the public mind was yet more generally and
profoundly agitated by a scandal which, in one point of view, was still
more painful, as in some degree involving the whole kingdom in its
disgrace.

The