d failed. It only remained now to try the effect of a
coalescence of Old Whigs and Tories.

Such was doubtless the chief motive of Fox in this extraordinary move.
The conduct of North seems harder to explain, but it was probably due to
a reaction of feeling on his part. He had done violence to his own
convictions out of weak compassion for George III., and had carried on
the American war for four years after he had been thoroughly convinced
that peace ought to be made. Remorse for this is said to have haunted
him to the end of his life. When in his old age he became blind, he bore
this misfortune with his customary lightness of heart; and one day,
meeting the veteran Barre, who had also lost his eyesight, he exclaimed,
with his unfailing wit, "Well, colonel, in spite of all our differences,
I suppose there are no two men in England who would be gladder to _see_
each other than you and I." But while Lord North could jest about his
blindness, the memory of his ill-judged subservience to the king was
something that he could not laugh away, and among his nearest friends he
was sometimes heard to reproach himself bitterly. When, therefore, in
1783, he told Fox that he fully agreed with him in thinking that the
royal power ought to be curbed, he was doubtless speaking the truth. No
man had a better right to such an opinion than he had gained through
sore experience. In his own ministry, as he said to Fox, he took the
system as he found it, and had not vigour and resolution enough to put
an end to it; but he was now quite convinced that in such a country as
England, while the king should be treated with all outward show of
respect, he ought on no account to be allowed to exercise any real
power.

Now this was in 1783 the paramount political question in England, just
as much as the question of secession was paramount in the United States
in 1861. Other questions could be postponed; the question of curbing the
king could not. Upon this all-important point North had come to agree
with Fox; and as the principal motive of their coalition may be thus
explained, the historian is not called upon to lay too much stress upon
the lower motives assigned in profusion by their political enemies. This
explanation, however, does not quite cover the case. The mass of the
Tories would never follow North in an avowed attempt to curb the king,
but they agreed with the followers of Fox, though not with Fox himself,
in holy horror of parliamentary