a "Church and King Club," which High Churchmen
had started in March, after the news of the triumph of their principles
in Parliament. The Manchester reformers struck the key-note of the
coming age by asserting in their programme that in every community the
authority of the governors must be derived from the consent of the
governed, and that the welfare of the people was the true aim of
Government. They further declared that honours and rewards were due only
for services rendered to the State; that all officials, without
exception, were responsible to the people; that "actions only, not
opinions, are the proper objects of civil jurisdictions"; that no law is
fairly made except by a majority of the people; and that the people of
Great Britain were not fully and fairly represented in Parliament.[25]

The Church and King Club, on the contrary, reprobated all change in "one
of the most beautiful systems of government that the combined efforts of
human wisdom has [_sic_] ever yet been able to accomplish." The issue
between the two parties was thus sharply outlined. The Tories of
Manchester gloried in a state of things which shut out about half of
their fellow-citizens from civic rights and their whole community from
any direct share in the making of laws. In their eyes the Church and the
monarchy were in danger if Nonconformists became citizens, and if a
score of Cornish villages yielded up their legislative powers to
Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and other hives of industry.

Scotland also began to awake. The torpor of that keen and intellectual
people, under a system of misrepresentation which assigned to them
forty-five members and forty-four to Cornwall, is incomprehensible,
unless we may ascribe it to the waning of all enthusiasm after the
"forty-five" and to the supremacy of material interests so
characteristic of the age. In any case, this political apathy was now to
end; and here, too, as in the case of England, Government applied the
spur.

On 10th May 1791 Sir Gilbert Elliot (afterwards Earl of Minto) brought
forward a motion in Parliament for the repeal of the Test Act, so far as
it concerned Scotland. He voiced a petition of the General Assembly of
the Church of Scotland, and declared that the Presbyterians felt the
grievance of being excluded from civic offices unless they perverted. On
wider grounds also he appealed against this petty form of persecution,
which might make men hypocrites but never sincere conv