cause
of progress on the continent, it assuredly threw back that cause in
Great Britain for more than a generation. Not only did its horrors and
enormities produce a reaction which paralysed the efforts of liberals in
this country, but the wars arising out of it engrossed for twenty years
the whole energy of the nation. Had it been possible for Pitt to pass a
reform bill after carrying the Irish union, the current of English
history would have been strangely diverted. The sublime tenacity of that
proud aristocracy which defied the French empire in arms, and nerved all
the rest of Europe by its example and its subsidies, would never have
been exhibited by a democratic or middle class parliament, and it is
more than probable that Great Britain would have stood neutral while the
continent was enslaved or worked out its own salvation. On the other
hand, in such a case, Great Britain might have been spared a great part
of the misery and discontent which, following the peace, but indirectly
caused by the war, actually paved the way for the reform movement. It
remained for a second French revolution, combined with the infatuation
of English tories, to supply the motive power which converted a party
cry into a national demand for justice. The reform act was, in truth, a
completion of the earlier English revolution provoked by the Stuarts.
Considering the condition of the people before its introduction, and the
obstinacy of the resistance to be overborne, we may well marvel that it
was carried, after all, so peacefully, and must ever remember it as a
signal triumph of whig statesmanship.

It was the crowning merit of the reform act, from a whig point of view,
that it stayed the rising tide of democracy, and raised a barrier
against household suffrage and the ballot which was not broken down for
a generation more. It put an end to an oligarchy of borough-owners and
borough-mongers; it was a charter of political rights for the
manufacturing interest and the great middle class. But it did nothing
for the working classes in town or country; indeed, by the abolition of
potwallopers and scot-and-lot voters in a few boroughs, they forfeited
such fragmentary representation as they had possessed. Hence the seeds
of chartism, already sown, were quickened in 1832; but socialism was not
yet a force in politics, and it was still hoped that, under the new
electoral system, the sufferings of the poor might be mostly remedied by
act of parliame