racy ruled more absolutely than ever in France, there was certainly a small circle round Fox and Sheridan which was enthusiastic for the ideas of the Revolution — all of which were of English provenance — and men talked of universal suffrage and Parliamentary reform.[1] But that was quite enough to induce both parties, under the leadership of a Whig (the younger Pitt), to take the sharpest measures to defeat any and every attempt to interfere in the slightest degree with the aristocratic régime for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The English nobility let loose the twenty-year war against France, and mobilized all the monarchs of Europe to bring about in the end, not the fall of Napoleon, but the fall of the Revolution — the Revolution that had had the naive daring to introduce the opinions of private English thinkers into practical politics, and so to give a position to the Tiers État of which the consequences were all the better foreseen in the English lobbies for having been overlooked in the Paris salons.[2]
What was called "Opposition" in England was — the attitude of one aristocratic party while the other was running the Government. It did not mean there, as it meant all over the Continent, professional criticism of the work which it was someone else's profession to do, but the practical endeavour to force the activity of Government into a form in which the opposition was ready and fit at any moment to take it over. But this Opposition was at once — and in complete ignorance of its social presuppositions — taken as a model for that which the educated in France and elsewhere aimed at creating, namely, a class-domination of the Tiers État under the eyes of a dynasty, no very clear idea being formed as to the latter's future. The English dispositions were, from Montesquieu onwards, lauded with enthusiastic misunderstanding — although these Continental countries, not being islands, lacked the first condition precedent for an "English" evolution. Only in one point was England really a model. When the bourgeoisie had got so far as to turn the absolute state back again into an Estaterstate, they found over there a picture which in fact had never been other than it was. True, it was the aristocracy alone who ruled in it — but at least it was not the Crown.
The result of the turn, and the basic form of the Continental States at the
- ↑ In 1793 there were 306 members of the House of Commons who were elected by 160 persons in all. Old Sarum, the constituency of the elder Pitt, consisted of one tenement, returning two members.
- ↑ Afterwards — from 1832 — the English nobility itself, through a series of prudent measures, drew the bourgeoisie into co-operation with it, but under its continued guidance and, above all, in the framework of tradition, within which consequently the young talent grew up. Democracy thus actualized itself here so that the Government remained strictly "in form" — the old aristocratic form — while the individual was free to practise politics according to his bent. This transition, in a peasantless society dominated by business interests, was the most remarkable achievement of inner politics in the nineteenth century.
South: these elements, fighting on the British side, decided the battle of Camden, and after the final victory of the rebels mostly emigrated to Canada, which had remained loyal.
